Compound Turbocharging

[domtoni]

Mike,

The e-boost was an interesting idea a few years back, but I knew of no perspective OEMs willing to take the program on.

Some thought dual speed supercharging would be a good solution as well, but again, no one except Antonov / Rotrex offered such a device and it was expensive.

Supercharging makes more sense as the unit is far easier to package and drive, you have no hot air running in the engine compartment, and that 300Z had a horrible amount of pipework. I'll bet his unit didn't work as well as he said it did.

 

[Brian Hamilton]

Mike,

The e-boost was an interesting idea a few years back, but I knew of no perspective OEMs willing to take the program on.

Some thought dual speed supercharging would be a good solution as well, but again, no one except Antonov / Rotrex offered such a device and it was expensive.

Supercharging makes more sense as the unit is far easier to package and drive, you have no hot air running in the engine compartment, and that 300Z had a horrible amount of pipework. I'll bet his unit didn't work as well as he said it did.

It works like a charm. So well in fact they're marketing them to the Supra guys and the Lexus guys who turbocharge their SC300's. Yeah there's a lot of piping involved, but man, it's incredible.

 

[Mark Hamstra]

For how long? My biggest concern for this kind of dual-turbo setup would be durability/reliability.

 

[Brian Hamilton]

Well from my understanding, both turbos are working much easier than a high boost single turbo system. If you run both turbos at 10 lbs of boost, you have an effective manifold pressure of 20 lbs due to the fact that the boost is compounded, hence the name. The engine itself is built beyond belief. The stock Supra engines are built waaaaay stronger than they ever needed to be in stock form. That's why people are making insane HP & TQ levels on the stock shortblock. It's still a test setup, so results are going to come later, but the idea of the setup makes great sense. Making the parts work smarter instead of harder helps reliability and duration and that's exactly what they're doing with this setup.

 

[Mark Hamstra]

It's not the turbos themselves that are likely to have reliability problems. It is the moving parts that accomplish the feat of distributing and proportioning the hot exhaust gases that are most likely to cause problems.