Turbocharged Engine example essay topic

Reflective Essay on Turbo Charging When people talk about race cars or high-performance sports cars, the topic of turbochargers usually comes up. Turbochargers also appear on large diesel engines. A turbo can significantly boost an engine's horsepower without significantly increasing its weight, which is the huge benefit that makes turbos so popular! Turbochargers are a type of forced induction system.

They compress the air flowing into the engine. The advantage of compressing the air is that it lets the engine squeeze more air into a cylinder, and more air means that more fuel can be added. Therefore, you get more power from each explosion in each cylinder. A turbocharged engine produces more power overall than the same engine without the charging. This can significantly improve the power-to-weight ratio for the engine. In order to achieve this boost, the turbocharger uses the exhaust flow from the engine to spin a turbine, which in turn spins an air pump.

The turbine in the turbocharger spins at speeds of up to 150,000 rotations per minute. And since it is hooked up to the exhaust, the temperatures in the turbine are also very high. A turbo is an expensive piece of equipment easily ranging from $50-$500. The reason that they are so expensive is of the precision of which they are built. Most new turbos have the turbine to spin on a ball bearing.

These ball bearings are far more advanced than regular bearings since a regular bearing spinning at the speeds that a turbo makes would explode. One also has to take into consideration the fan blades on the turbine so that they do not chip or break. Boost is measured in lbs. Most factory turbos are boosting to about 10. The extra horsepower that the boost makes can be related as for every pound of boost an extra 10 horsepower is added (ex.

10 lbs. of boost would roughly be an additional 100 HP! ). If engines are tuned properly they can safely take 20 lbs of boost or more. An easy but expensive way to make your 4 cylinder Honda GO would be to add a turbo kit. Since no Honda is equipped with a factory turbo, one has to be custom manufactured. A turbo kit can be bought for about 3 G's or about $3,000.

And since Honda engines are not built to take much boost from factory so one has to tune the engine to take the extra heat and power created. Some of the accessories for a turbo kit would include: Blow Off Valve (BOV) - releases the boost in the intake piping from the throttle body to the turbo; Intercooler- cools the air entering the engine (cooler air, more HP); Boost Controller- adjusts the amount of boost you want to run at a selected time; etc. The parts and options for building and engine are endless and take a big budget. I hope you have enjoyed learning about some of the things that I learn everyday.