Air Conditioned Oil Cooler, anyone seen one? Options

[McMark]

I've had a bit of trouble trying to find an answer to this question. I'm hoping maybe ya'll can help.

I'm wonding if any company makes an oil cooler that is Freon/R12/R134/etc to oil cooler instead of an air to oil cooler.

I have a car that will have AC and needs an oil cooler. It seemed smart to run a small portion of the AC refrigerant to cool the oil (no air required). But I can't find any reference of anyone having done this before or anyone selling units.

[Demick]

Mark

This sounds kind of like someone opening their freezer door to try and cool off their house - the end result is that the opposite happens.

The only real way to get rid of heat on a car is to eventually dump it out to the air. You have oil that you need to dump some heat out of. But rather than going straight to the air, you are suggesting transferring that heat to an A/C system. When you do that, the AC system now needs to get rid of that same amount of heat. Only the AC system takes work to do that. Where does that work come from? The engine. So the engine now needs to produce more power to run the AC system. Doing this work generates even more heat that will need to be gotten rid of as well. Where is all this heat going to go? Eventually, into the airstream as well - so now you've got to size your AC condensor (which is really just a radiator) to get rid of all that heat.

Here are some example numbers.
Say you want to dump 20,000 watts of heat from the oil.
So you transfer it from the oil to the freon.
The Freon now has an extra 20KW of heat to get rid of.
Due to efficiency of an AC system, it will take about 8KW of power to get rid of the 20KW of heat.
So the engine now needs to make an additional 8KW of power.
But the engine will create about 8KW more heat in generating this extra power (24KW of fuel --> 8KW goes to power, 8KW of heat goes out tailpipe, 8KW of heat goes to cooling system)
So now your oil has an extra 8KW of heat in it because you tried to us an AC system to get rid of 20KW of heat.

Anyway, you see my reasoning here. Bottom line is, you need to get the heat out to the air, and a radiator of some sort is the only real way to do that. So either way, you've got to have enough volume of air flowing through a large enough radiator - whether that radiator is an oil-to-air, water-to-air, or freon-to-air style, or any combination of the above. But going straight from oil-to-air will by far be the most efficient.

The laws of thermodymanics are at work here. The only part of it that you have a say in is the efficiency of the system. There's no magical way to get rid of the heat - it has to go somewhere.

Demick