I also have another ? Yesturday I was cruising Woodward at the Detroit Dream Cruise, it was hot and humid and the Cruise was a crawl. I monitored my engine temp which looked ok by the idiot gauge but i noticed a definate loss of power. Could it be the intercooler may have been too hot? I am a Ford mechanic but I have no experience with superchargers.

 

to be honest i would attribute a 101 things to loss of power before the intercooler on these.
fuel filter
fuel
boost by pass
so on and so on

 

Ambient and intercooler temperature has a BIG impact on the motor power. With no fan to move air through the intercooler, slow Woodward traffic will heat soak the intercooler circuit. You have probably read about the Super Cooler concept on the Lightning truck at the January Detroit car show. Ford has said this cooling is worth ~+50 HP. Some folks think it's worth more than that.

Using the SAE J1349 HP calculation method, one can look at the effect of temp, RH, altitude / baro pressure. Typical hot day conditions (90 deg F, 60% RH) show ~5% decrease in HP, compared to standard day conditions. If you are in slow traffic and the intercooler gets heat soaked, the numbers get a LOT worse. At 150 deg F, the HP is down ~18%. If the intercooler goes to 200 deg F, the HP is down ~27%.

These numbers don't include other heat related losses, such as the radiator cooling fan which is normally slipping through the viscous clutch, but a temps go up, it goes to direct drive and extract several HP from the motor. I don't know what the computer is doing at higher temps? It may be pulling timing out to compensate for possible detonation at high temps? This would produce even more HP loss.

Anyway, hot is bad. Stay cool.

 

Thank you for your response, I found it very informative. I figured it had to be the intercooler overheating.

 

Basically, an intercooler would impede air flow if not for the supercharger blowing air through it. At slow crawl with low RPM, the blower may not have been turning fast enough to build boost to counter the inherently more restrictive piping of intercooler. But then, I'm not a mechanic or a supercharger expert, but my explanation makes sense to me.

edit: oops, I guess croosr said pretty much the same thing, but better.