electric supercharging

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ankles

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hey,
I was just doing some reading online about electric superchargers because I was interested in suping up a 50cc scooter that a friend has. I dont know if any of you have ever played around with such a thing, but i was just curious if anyone had any ideas if supercharging would work on a two stroke motor the same way that it works on a four, considering the sinsitivity to the tuned pipe and all. There are some interesting ideas for car applications, with one of the most legitimate examples that i saw claiming a 1.7 psi boost (it only comes on at WOT so it doesn't screw your electrical system with 140 amp draw continually) which they claimed at 3%-6% boost in overall hp. anyways just playing around with the idea and thought it was a cheap and easy way to have some fun.
 
don't waste your time.


they can flow air at full throttle (cfms) but the PSI rating they use is a calculation from the air flow - not actual pressure built, and that's the problem, although they can flow air, they cannot really build pressure. So forget about all the cheap ones on e-bay or the e-Ram.

The on real one is from Thomas Knight (www.boosthead.com) and they look like conventional superchargers but cost more... and the power requirements are huge. even the best of boosthead's are only good on smaller engines because of the reason stated above.
 
I did the math on this stuff a while back. It really takes an insane amount of power to compress air. More than I think you can imagine. I got into a pretty heated flame war with some tool on another message board when he was stating that he could use a leaf blower to supercharge his 460. Needless to say, he was pretty misinformed.

Regardless of all that, electric superchargers will never, ever come to fruition. The power requirements are enormous. I figured to supercharge a 5L engine at 2200 RPM at 14.7psi you need to supply about 50kW. I think that was it, it was a while ago, it may have been a BIT less, but not by much. Regardless, in a 12V system, that's over 4,100A. Good luck with that.
 
ya now the best they say thay can do is 2psi. on a v8 that is nothing, but with the way the 24v system is starting to look it may not be far off. it is very posible, but it will take time to come up with somthing that will work the way it does in thery.
 
Humm, lets see. I can drive my blower directly from the crankshaft using a belt. OR, I can get that power from the crankshaft to the blower by adding the inefficiencies a HUGE alternator / electrical system / motor in between.

That's retarded engineering. Nothing to gain and everything to lose. That's about as intelligent as rechargable batteries on disposable sonabouys.
 
Electric superchargers are a smart persons get rich quick sceme. I've done the math also, but I did it for smaller engines. A 50hp load on a 24volt system would be 1580 amps, and its not uncommon for superchargers to pull way way more than 50hp, you can see where this is going.

Hey Iowa dude, the hawks suck! Just kiddin, I live in Iowa City.....my bro lives down in Muscatine....
 
CaptainZilog said:
I did the math on this stuff a while back. It really takes an insane amount of power to compress air. More than I think you can imagine. I got into a pretty heated flame war with some tool on another message board when he was stating that he could use a leaf blower to supercharge his 460. Needless to say, he was pretty misinformed.

Regardless of all that, electric superchargers will never, ever come to fruition. The power requirements are enormous. I figured to supercharge a 5L engine at 2200 RPM at 14.7psi you need to supply about 50kW. I think that was it, it was a while ago, it may have been a BIT less, but not by much. Regardless, in a 12V system, that's over 4,100A. Good luck with that.
Click to expand...

Wow.... that's roughly 100Hp for power conversion, more if you count for losses. What kind of blower were you looking at? I'm guessing a centrifugal, right?
 
kleetus said:
Wow.... that's roughly 100Hp for power conversion, more if you count for losses. What kind of blower were you looking at? I'm guessing a centrifugal, right?
Click to expand...

Naw, that's ideal. What you do is determine the T0 (initial temperature) and P0 (initial pressure) and then Tf (final temperature) and Pf (final pressure). When you determine what temperature the gas is heated to, you can take the difference in temperatures and then you find out how much heat energy ideally went into the compression of that gas. Then you need to find your efficiency. Superchargers are good if they hit 30% heat efficiency. Turbos are WAY better, BTW.

For a quick anecdote, a Top Fuel dragster that produces 5,000 crank HP, expels almost 1,500 EXTRA HP into driving the blower.
 
Putter-GLHT said:
Electric superchargers are a smart persons get rich quick sceme. I've done the math also, but I did it for smaller engines. A 50hp load on a 24volt system would be 1580 amps, and its not uncommon for superchargers to pull way way more than 50hp, you can see where this is going.
Click to expand...
Ahh, everything old is new again... I remember seeing the discussions of a "free power" electric supercharger on SHOTimes about 10 years ago, and a bunch of engineers (including a research engineer from Ford) pointing out what a crock of feces it was.

For reference, the supercharger on the 3.8l V6 in the T-Bird SC (which registered around 8psi max on the boost gauge in the instrument cluster) drew ~60HP at full boost--and that was to produce 235HP ('91-'97).
 
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