I read this post on another forum and it is not something that I have heard of before. Professionally I have seen them referred to as air to air heat exchangers or intercoolers for applications like ours.

"So, not to be nit picky but I see the term "intercooler" used often when "aftercooler" is the correct term.
"Intercoolers" are for increasing the charge density (cooling) between stages of charge compression (roots,scroll,centrifugal, etc.) , thus increasing the charge density even more than the charge compression alone.
"Aftercoolers" are for increasing the final charge density before it enters the engine.
Its really more of a location of the heat exchangers used in the process and not the actual type of exchanger.

Its just always been a pet peeve of mine."

 

 

Aviation term.

 

As Gee said, its a carryover term from aviation....

Intercooler = intermediate cooler. In automotive application this is post-turbo and pre-intake manifold. In aviation, it is a cooler between the first and second stage compressors in a multi-compressor layout.

Aftercooler = final stage cooler before the combustion chamber. In 99.99% of automotive applications, this means the same exact thing as an intercooler because automotive only typically ever has one stage of cooling for the charge air. Compound turbo setups do exist in automotive industry (primarily aftermarket performance diesel industry comes to mind), but it's pretty uncommon to see actually done as it creates a bit of a charge pipe plumbing nightmare. In a compound turbo setup running two charge air coolers at different stages, the aftercooler would be the second one and the intercooler would be the first. In aviation, cooling between stages is as common as seeing kittens on MT

So in summary, whoever posted that in another forum is just being his own worst enemy by caring about details that much. I could really fluff his feathers by calling a coolant hose a water-to-air radiator for the coolant system, because by definition it is.

 

I knew you guys would get a laugh out of this. I have seen so many manufactures list the options of their turbo vehicles as being intercooled. To me it seems to be the industry standard. BTW this was a thread about the new ZR1 corvette which is supposed to be twin turbo'ed.