Is a cooling system more effective run on just water, or with antifreeze/summer coolant as part of it.

i understand the reasons for adding coolant, and i'm not suggesting we all run our cars on just water, i'm just curious as this had come up as a point of discussion at work.

by adding a 50/50 mix of anti freeze to your coolant water does it increase or decrease the effectiveness of it, ie its thermal disipation attributes

are there chemicals in coolant that increase these properties, or is it purely there to prevent freezing rusting and clogging etc?

discuss

 

Anti freeze contains Glycol Ethelene to stop the water freezing at zero degrees C.

Its also contains corosion inhibitors - you need these with an ally head/block. There are also chemicals to help the coolant absorbe heat more easily too.

So in short - yes coolant helps cool your engine.

 

so these chemicals actually improve the heat absorbtion of the coolant, ie making radiaitors and coolers more effective?? anyone know the names of these chemicals?

sorry to get so techy, but its my line of work, and we are having an issue with an EGR cooler not beahving how its supposed to be as we run our engines on just water.

 

Still playing with cooled EGR then? lol

 

Why not use coolant?

or maybe http://www.redlineoil.com/products_coolant.asp

 

100% water in a coolant system is better at cooling than water and antifreeze.
Antifreeze reduces the efficiency.

It's job is frost protection and corrosion prevention and in engines that we want to last is more important than the slight loss of cooling efficiency.

 

Decrease.

 

More effective at shedding heat as pure water.

 

One of the Ford mags a little while ago did some tests of 'coolboost' and 'water wetter' etc.

During this test they also IIRC tested 100% water and a std 40-50% antifreeze mix, water only gave lower running temps.

 

Just taken the head off my saph due to a badly leaking headgasket.Been running the car for a year without antifreeze.To say the head is corroded is an understatement and all due to no antifreeze

 

I've had an engine hydraulic after bore failure becuase the previous owner didnt use anti-freeze...

 

so some conflicting arguments here.....

we run water as we dont need to worry about engines lifespan etc, and there are H&S (as always!!) with disposal of antifreeze on site at work.

so is pure water more effective then?

so say 2 engines running both steady state one with anti-freeze, one just pure water, which one has a more effective EGR cooler?

 

Pure water