Electric supercharger

grandprix90

My cousin bought a crappy electric supercharger the other day, and I must say it looks like a piece of crap. There is no way these things can work, right?

Toxis

this is seriously your first post? F*** no they don't work.

myork

There is one that actually works, but you need to install a few deep cycle batteries in the trunk, and it is a beefy 3 phase motor compressing the intake charge. It works almost kinda sorts like nitrous - it quickly discharges the batteries creating the power on a 1/4 mile run, then you have to wait for the batteries to recharge to use it again.

It does create legitimate boost - but IMHO not worth the added weight or the time needed to recharge.

dane_peterson

Toxis wrote:

this is seriously your first post?

My thoughts exactly.

Tim B.

Seems like a waste of time and energy to research and invest on such a useless product. But someone is always willing to buy anything.

PoweredByDodge

the 'electric superchargers' that go for 20 to 100 bucks are nothing more than water bilge pumps or high speed fans wrapped in an air duct tube. they do absolutely nothing worthwhile. it's been shown time and again that the amount of flow necessary to boost a motor's output cannot be created by electric power (think about it -- you need to spin an alternator to produce electricity... that takes horsepower -- you'll waste it tryin to make it)

anyway - there are some (believe it or not) belt driven baby superchargers that mount up like big fat giant alternators. they hook up with ducting rather than requring you to replace your intake manifold. one was made by ((i believe)) kenne-belle for the mach-1 mustang in 2003 (04 ??) there are others floating around, and they provide a good bang for the buck without ripping your car apart -- install in about 4 - 5 hours for the 'never did this **** before' kind of guy.

Jstas

I think you are talking about centrifugal supercharger...looks kind of like a turbocharger without the exhaust impellar?

If so, that design pre-dates the Roots and screw-type blowers from companies like BDS, Whipple, Eaton, Weiand and so on.

The electric ones though, they don't spin fast enough to create the air flow needed. You can get an electric motor to move a fan fast enough but you also need to design a fan blade that will be efficient enough to move a large enough volume of air. Given that, you can only move so much air with a 90mm-210mm fan. You can only spin it so fast before cavitation sets in and even at that, the fastest you can spin a fan, no matter how efficient the impellar is, is the speed of sound. After all, it's not the fan blade that moves air but rather the pressure wave the travels the width of the blade that moves the air. If the blades are moving faster than sound, they lose the ability to operate efficiently because the leading edge of the blade is ahead of the spot where the pressure wave forms. So the fan breaks the speed of sound then the drag gets so great it slows the blade down and it speeds up and slows down over and over. When that oscillation sets in, the fan will vibrate itself apart.

So it's not necessarily the electric motor that is the problem. It's the lack of power generation abilities in the engine combined with the limitations of physical size and efficiency of the impellar. A car's intake system is just too small to support the airflow necessary and it would take all of the power that engine could generate to turn an electric motor fast enough to move that air.

So these bogus little electric superchargers are bunk. Doesn't matter if it's a vaccum cleaner motor or a water pump motor or whatever. It has also been show through testing that some of these electric supercharger kits actually inhibit airflow because they have a lower CFM rating than what the engine's physical action is capable of generating itself. That means that these electric superchargers will actually work to reduce power rather than create it.