ok here is a conundrum. this is what happens when the temperature difference that you wan is too close to ambient.
I wanted to drop the air coming out the turbo to 40 degrees C.
You will find that the hot air leaving the intercooler is hotter than the intake air that it just exchanged heat with. This is the limitation of the LMTD method of heat exchange.
It results in a strange situation where the demand on the intercooler appears to be smaller as heat rates go up. you see that in the middle of the peaks.
Now this doesn't happen in reality. So obviously it means i simply can't cool the air to that which i desire. The air wont be able to go tp 40 degrees C for the conditions it can do 46 C min. The hot air passing over the intercooler will be about the same temp after heat exchange at that point.
When the air flow over the intercooler is doubled hower to 2400cfm, it can realize that 40 degree intake air temp that i want. Also means that the ideal size at that instant is quite small too.
So it very much a dynamic thing to size one of these things. It's almost as if you need to run a complete package on some kind of test bed. I know what are the limits at any given point in time. but when you select a size, how does it perform outside of it's sweet spot?
It's these things the engineers will look into before the select a size for their intercooler among other things.
what is for certain though, is that air flow will be very critical next year. It sounds counterintuitive, but if a team wants smaller sidepods, they must create bigger intake air holes for the radiators.