Producing more power from smaller engines is the goal of many car designers and engineers. Two areas that have been with us for a while and are becoming popular again are supercharging and turbocharging. Both focus on increasing power by manipulating the air in an engine.
The four stroke internal combustion engine is a fairly simple mechanism. The fundamental firing process involves fuel and air under pressure with a spark from a plug setting them off. This simple process have been given massive amounts of attention. At first, it was looked at in regard to producing more power for a car, particularly for those that were going to do some racing. Later, the process was looked at as a means to produce more power from smaller engines needed to meet fuel efficiency requirements.
Regardless of the reason, both approaches settled on air manipulation as the way to go. The basic idea was a simple one, but also a true one. The more air you can cram into the piston chamber, the more power you will get. This involved a two prong approach of pulling in denser, colder air and then cramming it under pressure into the piston chamber to mix with the gasoline. The two ways of doing this are supercharging and turbocharging.
The supercharger is a belt run mechanism. It compresses air and forces it into the cylinders of the engine. The supercharger is really just a compressor pump. It is run off a belt off the engine, which means it actually robs power from the engine to create more power. This creates a lot of power, but does serious damage to your fuel economy. Given the cost of fuel, this can be a big problem. For instance, the first new version of Mini Coopers came with superchargers. They’ve since switched to our second system – the turbocharger.
A turbocharger does the same thing a supercharger does. It compresses air and shoves it into the cylinders. The increased air pressure creates more power from small engines. The technology was heavily developed in Formula One years ago until it was banned due to the extremely high speeds being achieved. Regardless, there is one big difference from superchargers. The turbocharger is actually run off of the exhaust from the engine instead of a belt system. The exhaust leaves the engine and passes through a turbine, the turbo, before going through the exhaust system. This turbine connects to compressor. The compressor then forces air into the engine creating more power.
Most modern cars use a turbocharger over a supercharger. The reason? The turbocharger is much more fuel efficient, but still provides comparable power increases.
Dirk Gibson is with DCJAutoParts.com - where you can find the lowest prices on high performance
auto parts and accessories.
