Vortech's engineering staff has years of experience with charge cooler designs for many types for supercharged and turbocharged applications such as automobiles, boats and aircraft. We felt that improving supercharger efficiency was more important, and with improved efficiency, an aftercooler was unnecessary with the lower boost levels popular at that time. The Current Design For heat exchanger design purposes, the gases in air are classified as a low-density fluid. A supercharger compresses the charge air before it enters the engine. The act of compression both increases the energy and density of the charge air, but this act also generates a proportionate amount of heat.
Heating is undesirable, as it tends to decrease the density of the charge air.
One way to deal with heating is to cool the charge air after it leaves the supercharger and before it enters the engine. Frictional losses means the pressure drop which is naturally caused by running the compressed air through ducting and twists and turns and lengths of tubes. In fact, frictional losses caused by using a cooling mechanism can be so great that there can actually be a net loss in air density. That means if the cooling mechanism is not designed right, you start at 10 lbs, run through twists and turns and lengths losing 4 lbs, and end up at 6. It's almost not possible to compensate for that sort of misdesign.