F150 Intercoolers

What does an intercooler actually do?

The intercooler is an integral part of turbocharger systems on modern vehicles, and cools the pressurized air coming from your F150 EcoBoost's turbochargers so that you're not just dumping hot air into your already (presumably) hot engine. Air from your turbochargers flows through the end tanks and core of your F150's intercooler, while slipstream air flows into the face of the intercooler to generate air-to-air cooling. Your stock intercooler technically does the job, but as usual with OEM components a bunch of compromises needed to made to keep the bean counters happy, and it's definitely not the most effective thing in the world.

Tube-Fin vs. Bar-Plate Intercoolers
There's essentially two different intercooler designs available: tube-fin and bar-plate. Tube-fin intercoolers feature extruded tubes with fins pressed in and radiate heat into slipstream air running through the intercooler. The factory intercooler features a tube-fin design, and a couple of aftermarket intercoolers use tube-fin designs. The primary advantages of tube-fin intercoolers is that they're light, generally less expensive, and allow more airflow to go through the intercooler and to radiators and other air-cooled components. The downside is that they aren't as thermally efficient as bar-plate intercoolers, and aren't the greatest for outright performance. Bar-Plate designs are much more common in aftermarket intercoolers. Bar-Plate feature fairly thick aluminum cross-bars built into the core, which act as heat sinks on their own which improves overall cooling over typical tube-fin designs. While more efficient, bar-plate intercoolers are heavier and block more airflow to other components. Still, if you're going for power above all other considerations, then bar-plate is the way to go.

Single-Pass vs. Dual-Pass Intercoolers:
On top of the two basic intercooler core designs, there's two internal designs for intercoolers that you'll see in the aftermarket: single-pass and dual-pass. Single-pass intercoolers have cores where charge air only passes through them once, which the principle idea being to get charge air through the intercooler as fast as possible to avoid a pressure drop by having less travel time for charge air. Single-pass designs usually have better peak power than dual-pass designs, but don't cool charge air as well which means you get a power drop-off earlier in the rev range. Dual-Pass intercoolers force charge air to pass through the core twice in a snake-like pattern. While this does increase travel time and distance of charge air, a dual-pass intercooler does provide more heat dissipation, which leads to cooler IATs. So while you likely won't see the peak power gains as a single-pass design, a dual-pass holds more power higher into the rev range which makes it ideal for towing applications.

Does an intercooler help with water ingestion?
EcoBoost water ingestion problems are well-known. If you've never heard of "EcoBoost Shudder" , it's caused by the engine sucking in a combination of blow-by oil and condensation that pools in the intercooler since it's the lowest point of the intake system and is a natural condenser due to its design. As to whether an intercooler helps eliminate the problem, and short answer is "Yes...but also no." Yes, an aftermarket intercooler can help with condensation/water-ingestion issues by giving you a perfectly dry intercooler all over again, and dual-pass intercoolers tend to suck in less pooled liquid than standard OEM single-pass intercooler. That all being said, an intercooler does not solve the root cause of shuddering problems, which is the PCV system allowing blow-by through in the first place. The only real solution is adding a catch can to your F150, preferably a dual-valve or dual-can setup that captures from both PCV ports. On every truck that we've ripped the factory intercooler off of, we've had at least some oil spill out, and the only real solution is capturing oil blow-by before it hits the intercooler at all.