Turbocharger

Turbocharger

 

Turbochargers are used to increase engine performance by compressing intake air before it enters the engine combustion chamber. Turbochargers are air pumps driven by the engine’s exhaust gas stream. The heat and pressure of the exhaust gases spin the turbine blades of the pump.

 

 

 

In general, piston inside a reciprocating engine moves up and down to intake fresh air and to exhaust gas. This means the suction force from the engine is decided by the vacuum of cylinder, (this type of engine is called as natural aspirated engine, NA-Engine), therefore, the maximum air amount into engine cylinder and combustion chamber cannot exceed the volume of cylinder. But now with turbocharger with blades in both of turbine and compression side, we can increase the charge air amount significantly with a minimum loss of engine power. This is the reason of using turbochargers.

 

The combustion pressure of an engine is proportionally increasing to the air amount being sucked into cylinder. Simply because of this basic principle, we need to supply more air into cylinder to gain more power and performance from the engine. But nothing is for free, to generate more power from bigger amount of air and fuel, the part of the engine must experience much bigger thermal or mechanical stress, therefore the engine hardware itself must be adapted to the upgraded power configuration.

 

 

After Cooler & Charge Air Cooler

 

When we install turbocharger we can supply much bigger (1.5 to 2.2 times) amount of air into cylinder with one small disadvantage. This small trouble is the temperature of intake air is getting heated because of compression effect, in turn this heating effect will decrease the possible air amount heading into cylinder. How to solve it ?  We should cool down intake air by installing a heat exchanger on the way of air path between compressor of the turbocharger and cylinder. If the heat exchanger is cooled down by ram air, we call it “Charge air cooler” and the cooling is done by engine coolant, the heat exchanger is called as “After cooler”.

 

 

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