Does an Intercooler affect Horsepower?

Designed to feed cold air to your car’s engine – Intercoolers are a must-have for any performance vehicle, ensuring both performance and enhancing your car’s overall look. These devices are more common in supercharged cars, as turbo boosters cause the air being fed to the engine to heat up significantly.

Intercoolers play a significant role by cooling down the heated air and circulating it to your car’s engine. Moreover, the air becomes compressed and denser, meaning more oxygen molecules are available for the engine to burn. 

However, with all these benefits, the question still remains – does an intercooler affect horsepower? To answer this question, it is essential to first understand how intercoolers work.

How Do Intercoolers Function?

Similar to radiators, intercoolers lower the temperature of the air being fed to the engine, compressing it and making it denser. However, intercoolers do this by using air as a medium for transferring heat. This lowers the engine’s temperature, increasing overall performance. This makes them more effective for cooling down the engine as compared to traditional radiators. 

Intercoolers and Horsepower

To answer the initial question, yes, intercoolers do affect horsepower. However, it should be noted that intercoolers do not produce horsepower. Based on the thermodynamic laws, the larger the temperature difference, the higher the amount of energy converted through combustion. In the engine’s case, the air entering the engine can be referred to as the temperature. If cooler air enters the engine, the temperature difference will be much higher, resulting in more power.

Intercoolers perform this exact function, cooling down the heated air and sending the cooler air to the engine. As explained earlier, this produces more power, and in turn, much more horsepower. If we look at the numbers, every 10 degrees drop in temperature boosts your car’s horsepower by 1 percent. With the right intercooler, your car can achieve much greater horsepower.

The Bottom Line

To put it simply, an intercooler will not create more horsepower for your car. However, it will influence it by allowing your engine to bathe in cooler air, greatly boosting horsepower. This is beneficial for turbocharged cars as this allows for less pressure on the boost cylinders, and makes the whole process much smoother.

Keeping these factors in mind, it is essential for any performance vehicle to have an intercooler installed. Get a universal intercooler for your car today from Turborevs and take your car’s performance to the next level.