Electrical Supercharger. Whats the Catch?

Manewaymja2 · Mar 17, 2009

Does anyone out there know anything about electrical Superchargers and if they even work like say on a Mustang?

Wallzy · Mar 17, 2009

Electric Supercharger = Fail

Manewaymja2 · Mar 17, 2009

LOL i thought so as i dont understand the concept they are pushing period.

Flavadave4 · Mar 17, 2009

I like the leaf blower idea better.

Manewaymja2 · Mar 17, 2009

jrichker · Mar 17, 2009

They work very well at sucking money out of your wallet! :

Seriously, they are a scam and will not work.

Darkwriter77 · Mar 17, 2009

Actually, some guys farting around with a Civic on a dyno actually had some measurable gains by shooting a leafblower right into the intake tube. They also stood there and opened a valve on a nitrous bottle and squirted it into the intake the same way. I think they wound up with like 50 horses over stock combining the two tricks. So, at least in theory, a leafblower WOULD do something, at least for a low-horsepower motor like a Civic. However, good luck trying to get through tech at the drag strip with a Mexican strapped onto your hood...

The electric supercharger *MIGHT* show some teeny-tiny gains on, like, a four-banger Fox because they don't pull all that much air to begin with, but I'm pretty sure a stock 302 draws more air at WOT than that little blower could even churn out, anyway ... not to mention the fact that it would be an airflow obstruction and it would add an additional draw upon your electrical system.

warriorpluto · Mar 17, 2009

electric supercharger=hair dryer. thats all.......want a cheap setup go turbo or find a used supercharger.

Mustang5L5 · Mar 17, 2009

The problem is powering the electric supercharger. If you could design on that actuallt created boost, it would be 1.) expensive and 2.) require so much energy the load on your alt would be nearly equivalent as if it was mechanically driven.

Leavblowers are nice when you plug them into your house. Try to operate one off your car

dcurtis · Mar 17, 2009

Get the electric supercharger idea out of your head If you want electric buy a hybrid.

93 LX · Mar 17, 2009

Well whats the difference in theory of how the air gets in to the intake? Turbo uses exhaust, supercharger uses the engine. If infact you got a larger enough motor and enough power to push 20 psi wouldnt that do the same as your supercharger attached to the engine. Now on point what I have seen out there is nothing more than scam..... however in the future who knows...

Darkwriter77 · Mar 17, 2009

93 LX said:
Well whats the difference in theory of how the air gets in to the intake? Turbo uses exhaust, supercharger uses the engine. If infact you got a larger enough motor and enough power to push 20 psi wouldnt that do the same as your supercharger attached to the engine. Now on point what I have seen out there is nothing more than scam..... however in the future who knows...

That's just it, there's nothing on the market that'll do 20 psi, let alone 4 psi. Most you could hope for is 1 or 2 psi, at best, and even that would be really unlikely. Again, a stock 302 would suck more CFM on its own than an electric fan motor could ever push out, and even if it could match that, it couldn't push more than that amount of air to actually create boost. On a crappy little sub-100-horse four- or three-cylinder motor, I can see 1 or 2 psi of boost from one of those as being possible ... but, again, the amount of draw upon your electrical system will be transferred to your alternator and create enough drag on the accessory belt to pretty much negate any gains you might see.

Maybe if you had a deep cycle battery dedicated to that thing, operating on a switch...? But nah, the weight of the extra battery and so on would again cancel out any potential gains.

I'll just stick with my leafblower idea. An electric supercharger costs, what, $100 or $200? There's dudes standing on the corners all over downtown Mesa that will work all day for 1/4th that price ... but good luck convincing him that lying upon the hood with a leafblower is a safe idea. Alternatively, if you could make enough room underhood, you could get a gas-powered leaf blower and just rig up some throttle linkage to pull the throttle trigger on the blower whenever you want. But bear in mind, you'd also have to pull-start that sucker every time you start the car ... unless they make electric-start leafblowers...

Flavadave4 · Mar 17, 2009

I guess if we are just talking about moving air you could fill an air tank...compressed air off a quick dump valve would give you a boost if you could get the fuel to add to it?

Darkwriter77 · Mar 17, 2009

Flavadave4 said:
I guess if we are just talking about moving air you could fill an air tank...compressed air off a quick dump valve would give you a boost if you could get the fuel to add to it?

True ... but I imagine that'd have to be one helluva huge air tank to hold the amount of air you'd need to make a WOT pass, especially down a 1/4 mile track.

Hawkeye_306 · Mar 17, 2009

The concept of an electric supercharger is sound, but they don`t work in practice.

The advantage would be that you can control when to store electrical energy, and when to use it – for a supercharger you are tied to the engine speed, and with a turbo you are tied to the exhaust velocity. If you had a system to store/use the energy, you could build up energy when the engine is not being run hard – like when cruising on the interstate – and be able to use the energy when you need it without putting extra demand on the engine (like the load you would draw for a supercharger).

This is analogous to Hybrids – where you store energy when the engine is running efficiently, then use energy when the engine is under demand.

In practice, however, a 12 volt system cannot support a blower with an appreciable amount of boost. If we ever go to a 46 volt system you will see electric superchargers, but as long as we stay with a 12 volt system they are not practical. You would need to convert the power from DC to AC to DC to step up the voltage to get good boost on today`s cars. I have not seen a blower with this capability built in. I am not sure if that is practical or not, but that is the only way the blower would be worthwhile. I have only seen ones that run on 12 volts, and that is just not adequate for any noticeable boost.

If anyone has seen an electric blower that can put out descent boost, I would like to hear about it.

strtrcr50 · Mar 17, 2009

Don't listen to these negative nancies.. I put a turbonator on my car and gained 55 horsepower.. An electric supercharger has to be good for at least twice that.

Darkwriter77 · Mar 17, 2009

Hawkeye_306 said:
If anyone has seen an electric blower that can put out descent boost, I would like to hear about it.

View attachment 265979

I just had a hair-brained idea: Could a 12-volt motor, just a plain electric motor of some kind, be made to turn a centrifugal supercharger (rather than the belt drive system) and then THAT could be used to produce boost? Or, barring that, could someone rig up a step-up system like what you've described to produce the voltage necessary to power a DC (or AC?) motor that would turn a centrifugal supercharger to add a boost-on-demand ability?

I'm thinking, if one could get such an electric motor powerful enough to do the trick, one could rig up something akin to Mad Max's Interceptor with the switchable blower. In fact, the dudes who built the car for the movie used an electric motor to make the blower on that car an on/off thing, but I dunno if it actually had any internals within the Weiland blower they used, or if it simply turned a pulley on the outside of the unit. That would be beyond killer ... a Fox Mustang (say, a GT, given the similar front-end) with a hole cut out of a Mach 1 hood and a giant blower sticking up out of it, all of it painted black...

Demonstrational video of said concept can be found nyaw:

YouTube - INTERCEPTOR engine sound

strtrcr50 · Mar 18, 2009

Darkwriter77 said:
View attachment 265965

I just had a hair-brained idea: Could a 12-volt motor, just a plain electric motor of some kind, be made to turn a centrifugal supercharger (rather than the belt drive system) and then THAT could be used to produce boost? Or, barring that, could someone rig up a step-up system like what you've described to produce the voltage necessary to power a DC (or AC?) motor that would turn a centrifugal supercharger to add a boost-on-demand ability?

I'm thinking, if one could get such an electric motor powerful enough to do the trick, one could rig up something akin to Mad Max's Interceptor with the switchable blower. In fact, the dudes who built the car for the movie used an electric motor to make the blower on that car an on/off thing, but I dunno if it actually had any internals within the Weiland blower they used, or if it simply turned a pulley on the outside of the unit. That would be beyond killer ... a Fox Mustang (say, a GT, given the similar front-end) with a hole cut out of a Mach 1 hood and a giant blower sticking up out of it, all of it painted black...

Demonstrational video of said concept can be found nyaw:

YouTube - INTERCEPTOR engine sound

It'd have to be a hell of an electric motor to spin a centri blower at 50-60k rpm AND be capable of the HP it takes to spin a blower that fast. IIRC, you're easily into the 50+hp range to spin a blower that fast.

If you were inclined to turn the blower on and off, why not adapt an A/C clutch?

Electrical Supercharger. Whats the Catch?

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