Superchargers and Turbochargers

Yesterday was about naturally aspired, or using the pressure of the atmosphere in your air flow system to bring oxygen to the engine.

There are very popular methods that go far beyond this and compress the air before it enters the combustion chambers. One is called supercharging and the other is turbocharging. While they sound different and people will argue for hours which is better, in fact both approaches do the same thing. That is they take incoming air and compress it. This allows more oxygen in the same amount of space and increases your horsepower when it is burned.

There are several differences between the two approaches. The first is how is the system powered? In a supercharger system, the power comes directly from the engine. The supercharger is linked via a belt, or sometimes gears directly to the engine. So as the engine turns, so does the supercharger.

The turbocharger is not directly powered by the revolving engine, but is driven by the exhaust gases from the engine. So the turnbocharger will not start to compress air until the engine has reached some particular speed and the exhaust flow is sufficient to spin the turbocharger up to operating speed.

Tomorrow we will take a closer look at how they work.

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More Air = More Power

Yesterday I started blogging about the correct air / fuel mixture. Now let's continue with more air. Air contains oxygen, and the oxygen is what allows the fuel to ignite and burn. The more air you can get in your engine during it's intake cycle, the more power potential you have.

Anything that increases the air flow or increases the amount of oxygen in the air leads to this increase, anything that restricts or slows down the air flow reduces the power output. So what does each?


If the air's temperature rises it can hold less oxygen and if you can cool the air it will carry more oxygen. If their are any restrictions in the incoming air flow path less air is drawn into the engine. So to solve both of these problems devices called cold air intakes and short ram intakes are designed to pull in cooler, more dense air (more oxygen) and to eliminate as many restrictions as possible.


Another way to increase the air/oxygen flow is to compress the incoming air. Devices such as superchargers and turbocharges are designed to compress the air and deliver more oxygen to the engine. The key difference between these two devices is that the supercharger is directly driven by the engine (belts or gears) and the turbocharger is driven off of the waste exhaust gases produced by the engine.

So far everything mentioned can be done to a fairly stock car for street use. When you want to race a car, other steps involving smoothing the internal engine paths, special tuning, and changing such things as the compression ratio, cam timing, reducing engine part weights and other more complicated techniques, can be done.

I will not be getting into these advanced methods in this blog for a while.

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