Save Money By Keeping Charge Your Personal Air Cooler Working
Well
If like everyone else these days, you're looking to reduce your
fuel costs, check your charge air coolers. Also called an
intercooler, this component of your engine is essential to
keeping your engine fuel efficient. As part of the turbocharger
mechanism, if your charge air cooler is leaking or not working
properly, your engine's combustion, horsepower and emissions are
all affected. If your engine isn't working at its best, you'll
be burning fuel unnecessarily.
To understand how charge air coolers work, it's important to
first understand something about how air acts around heat. The
more that air gets compressed, the hotter it gets. And as the
air temperature increases, it expands as well. This increase in
temperature and pressure is part of the turbo charging process.
But what you want to get the best performance from your turbo
charging technology is to get more air into the mechanism, not
just more air pressure. So as the hot, compressed air comes out
of the compressor, you want to cool the air before it passes
into the engine. This is where charge air coolers come in. A
charge air cooler looks sort of like a radiator, only it works a
bit differently. Air passes both inside the cooler and along the
outside, so that the air is cooled and made more dense before it
gets passed into the engine. That way more air molecules are
available in the engine for combustion. The more air molecules
there are available for combustion, the more efficient
combustion will be and the more turbo charge that your engine
will get for the fuel that is used.
There are some symptoms in your vehicle's performance that can
suggest that the problem is with the charge air cooler. If you
see a great deal of black exhaust or smoke coming from the
exhaust, that could be a sign. So could a sluggish feeling in
the engine or a situation where you suddenly lose horsepower. If
the engine is consistently operating at a hotter temperature
than normal or you notice that you seem to be using more fuel
than normal, your charge air cooler could be a problem. But not
always will charge air coolers need to be replaced. They can
often be rebuilt to a point that they will work just efficiently
as ever. But make sure that the repair shop that you choose has
experience in working with charge air coolers so that you get
the job done right the first time.