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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