Wondering what experience anybody has had with these little electric supercharger systems like this one,

http://www.streetbeatcustoms.com/RAM/Super...r-System/18149/

says it makes 1psi boost and gets 15 hp. surely not as much boost as a nice supercharger,
but at $400 compared to the $6,000 kit for a supercharger, I may have to at least consider it ya know.

Lol. Trust me. These electric supercharger doesn't get you any power. If anything no more than 1whp. There's a video on YouTube where it was busted. They also proved that you're better off buying leaf blowers since they'll give you more power than those electric superchargers. Lol.

what he said

Haha this is AWESOME...



I don't think someone has posted about these on here in the last three or four years....but totally remember when that was the norm.

ya it looked too good to be true , that's what I thought

Here is that youtube video, MightyCarMods - great thing.

And if you think about it using some knowledge about physics, you can easily get to conclusion, that a simple fan can't create compression, because the air pressure on the outer and inner side of the fan is exactly the same. Maybe it can even get in the way of the air, that the engine is sucking through the intake.

>

+1

Ya, I know a thing or two about the big centrifugal compressors they use for large Chiller machines. ...and I was wondering how you can handle more pressure with a rubber intake hose


yet, having said that I also have seen the one where they mythbust the CAI, and say it's junk too. Like the comments he addresses at the beginning about airflow. When you are traveling down the highway you are moving through the air at 60 or so mph,
the car is moving through an infinite volume of air surrounding the car, this cannot be properly simulated by a little bitty 24" fan in front of the car.
If you put your dyno inside a Wind tunnel I could call that accurate. a 24" round fan is 12^2(3.14)=452 sq" or 3.14 sq' , with a velocity of 1000 fpm that's only about 3200 cfm. Ive seen some specs that say these fans put out up to 6000 cfm.
so let's see, the car is about 70" wide and 50" tall, if you make a box slightly bigger call it 80"x55" =4400 sq" or 30.5 sq', there is at least this much air surrounding the car as you travel 60 mph, which is 5280 feet per min.
30.5 sq' x 5280 fpm = 161,040 cubic feet/min.

I'm sure the electric supercharger is junk, because its a fan and not a centrifugal compressor. but I think their setup isn't good for testing things like the cold air intake.

I like the idea, its like the KERS system on formula 1 cars. Charge up the battery when the car is normal driving then hit a button and expend all the stored energy. Its like nitrous but it recharges.

but this product is crap for sure

There was a video of some guys down south using a leaf blower on a pickup truck and actually testing it on the dyno. They had it shoved into the intake hose and their before and after was actually a 20 wheel horsepower gain lol.


I think it would be hilarious to pull up next to someone at a red light and hear a leaf blower kick on under their hood.... "Poulan just kicked in yo"

I've seen that video with leaf blower on a dyno run as well

But the main difference when talking about air intakes is between naturally aspirated engines and engines with forced induction. While NA engines run in atmospheric pressure, therefore the air is sucked in the engine, FI engines run in high pressure circumstances, where the compressed air is forced into the engine.

Therefore no fan-powered air intake system can actually put more air in the engine, than the engine itself can suck (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the leaf blowers use the fan as well). The only possible increase in horsepower is made, if you give the engine more air to be sucked and this is exactly what SRI does: bigger diameter hose, bigger air filter - more to be sucked. I guess you can say the same about the leaf blower here

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be a wiseguy (nobody likes wiseguys), just trying to help understand the big difference.

This post has been edited by Nihil: Dec 19, 2013 - 9:29 AM

You are correct for the most part.

However since there is a maximum amount of air that the engine can take in at once... what happens to any "extra" air shoved in there by the leaf blower? If there are no leaks and no way for that air to escape the pressure will build (this is what will eventually cause the leaf blower to slow down and become stressed because of the air pushing back on it).

It's a combination of creating a MINIMAL amount of pressure in the system (again if there are no leaks) and the major change which is that most stock intakes aren't utilized to maximize the amount of air the engine CAN use. So in that video when both parameters were changed they got a pretty significant power gain.

I am by absolutely no means suggesting that ANYONE actually try using a leaf blower on a vehicle as a means of gaining power.

This post has been edited by cardshark525: Dec 19, 2013 - 10:38 AM

Yes, I totally agree and so I brought some slides to illustrate

What we think of as a typical compressor is the piston/cylinder design our motors are;
piston goes up, compresses the air/fuel into a smaller volume.
This is called a Positive displacement compressor.

But a Centrifugal compressor is not a positive displacement compressor, it works a little different

these pics are of a machine used to compress vapor refrigerant, it is driven by a large electric motor but the compressor end is quite the same as what we call a turbo charger.
Just imagine a turbo unit about 36-48" across.





the compressor uses three main parts , the impeller, the diffuser, and the volute.



the vapor enters through the center, and then is quickly spun out into the diffuser, which is just sort of a ring with little holes in it, but this slows down the vapor while the impellor is continuously slamming more molecules on top of it.
This is how the vapor is compressed. Then, in the case of a car's turbo system, we now feed Compressed air to the system and you get a lot more Bang out of it.





the 'electric supercharger' is only the impeller without the compressor, so it certainly does not get the same effect.
and if you're running higher pressure you need stronger, larger pipes to manage it.

A leaf blower has a turbine inside not a fan. The vanes inside your brake rotor work the same way. A leaf blower could build compression, but in reality it is built for moving a large volume at a low pressure. To build pressure you need extremely tight tolerances, a leaf blower probably has a gap between the blades and the housing that could be measured in quarters of an inch. Your oil pump has .001's of an inch clearances if I remember right. It needs such tight clearances to build oil pressure for the motor because oil would just flow backwards through any gap and not build any pressure. Now consider that oil is enormously thicker than air and there for with its lower resistance to flow much more likely to slip past the blades of the impeller.

Lastly consider a turbocharger rotates at speeds over 100,000rpms while a leaf blower has the impeller bolted directly to the crankshaft or motor, meaning its not going to be spinning faster than maybe 10k rpms or half that. The vanes are moving so slow that the air can just rush back past the impeller.

It would improve the function of the engine, but the cost and complexity of installing an electric turbine or leafblower far exceeds the benefit. Swapping motors or spending money on your cylinder head would be much more cost effective.

This post has been edited by Special_Edy: Dec 19, 2013 - 4:01 PM