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warm. In
my plane, with a mechanical, and EWP, no
thermostat, and running 75% power,
I still seriously doubt the radiator could freeze.
Cheers,
Rusty (the disbeliever)
When you've got it set up to keep the engine within
reason on a 90* day? Think of it this way. Cold air is running through
the oil cooler, so the burden on the water isn't
quite as high. The water sits in the radiator a
little longer (a radiator that is designed to pull
the heat from the water whether the water is flowing
or not). The water gets FRIGID, but not frozen. When the EWP cuts in, it pumps the frigid water into
the hot engine and really brings the temps down. It
takes a little longer to heat up that frigid water
to 180, and meanwhile the other part of the water is
waiting in the rad getting even colder than the
first batch. Water doesn't flow evenly everywhere
thoughout the rad, and eventually in some low flow
recess, ice starts to form. Flow begins to be
restricted, but since you're dumping icewater on the
engine, you don't notice a temperature problem. Until the flow is completely restricted.
Once it is nearly restricted, you have a high volume
of frozen air to freeze a small amount of water
through a device designed to transfer heat as
quickly as possible. Before you can get to the
ground, I would suspect that your radiator would be
a large ice-cube.
What makes me so confident? I used to drive
18-wheelers. I had an old Mack that I had to
struggle to keep from overheating in NC summers. Had a load up to Kentucky in the dead of winter. The heater that never went past the halfway point
wasn't enough to keep me from driving with a blanket
around my shoulders. I would've thought that the
mountain driving would have kept the engine hot, but
it didn't. The only thing that helped was a big
chunk of cardboard on the front grill.
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