Heat exchanger arrangement particularly for motor vehicle

Abstract

A heat exchange arrangement for a vehicle has at least two heat exchangers exposed to the action of ambient air. One of the heat exchanger is coolant cooler and the other one is a charge-air coolant. Each of these coolers has tubes through which liquid or gas flows and heat dissipating ribs connected to the tubes. The coolant cooler is positioned upstream of the charge-air cooler in the air-flow direction. The charge-air cooler has an overlapping region in which the coolant cooler and the charge-air cooler overlap one another and a non-overlapping region in which the coolant cooler projects substantially perpendicularly to the cooling air flow direction. The non-overlapping region is formed at least in the charge-air outlet region and is cooled directly by ambient cooling air. The overlapping region is cooled by the ambient cooling air that has passed through the coolant cooler, which is positioned immediately upstream of the overlapping region of the charge-air cooler.

Description

[0001] The present application is a divisional of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 307,584, filed Dec. 2, 2002, which is a divisional of application Ser. No. 09 / 350,105, filed Jul. 9, 1999 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,619,379), the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND [0002] A coolant cooler dissipates excess heat produced by an internal combustion engine of a motor vehicle to ambient air. Moreover, with supercharged internal combustion engines, a charge-air cooler cools air, which has been heated and compressed in a supercharger, and dissipates heat to ambient air. The operations of cooling charge air and coolant are fundamentally different. The coolant undergoes only a small drop in temperature because the coolant has a high heat capacity. A large heat quantity thus can be exchanged even with slight cooling. In contrast, the charge air temperature is considerably higher when it enters the charge-air cooler and has to be considerably lower than that of the c...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007] The present invention relates to a heat exchanger arrangement that can reduce the design outlay. Furthermore, the installation space, both in terms of the depth in the air-flow direction and perpendicularly thereto, can be kept as low as possible, to achieve the greatest possible heat-exchanging capacity over a smallest possible surface area.

Problems solved by technology

This conventional arrangement is disadvantageous in that cooling air flowing on the air side becomes heated to a very pronounced extent in the upstream charge-air cooler.

Moreover, very large cooling-air streams are necessary, and they require in some cases very high fan capacities.

Such an arrangement has a disadvantage in that, on account of the charge-air cooler being split into two charge-air-cooler parts, increased design outlay is necessary, in particular in terms of the charge-air-side connection of the two charge-air-cooler parts to one another for passing on the charger from one charge-air-cooler part to the other.

This arrangement likewise is disadvantageous in that increased design outlay is necessary for passing on the charge air and the coolant to the respectively associated charge-air-cooler part and coolant-cooler part.

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