Evildead

I would expect such a setup to be sluggish and laggy, you'll need a big-a** charger in the first place...don't know what will happen when you've reached your target pressure, say 2 bar, the charger comes to a full halt maybe?

[Edited by Evildead - 5/1/2002 4:05:14 PM]

UK271

If newbie questions dick you off then you're probably best leaving this one alone...

but...
If you massively increased the pressure of the air flowing into the intercooler the temperature would rise significantly - at this point you'd need a beefy IC. But the difference in temperature between the air in the IC and ambient temperature would result in a large increase in loss of heat energy. Suppose then that the air passes from the IC through a pressure regulator allowing the air to expand and the pressure to drop to normal boost pressure. Surely the expansion of the air would result in further cooling, and since much more heat energy was lost in the IC the resulting air charge would be much cooler? ...bit like a fridge?

DavidRB

... but the point of the turbocharger is to increase the pressure in the first place, that's how they generate more power!

UK271

Yes...but you don't let the pressure drop back to atmospheric...that would be daft, just back to normal boost presure...the IC becomes more like a reservoir of compressed air. That way maybe you don't need to lose any energy through a wastegate, or dump valve...it's just stored as gradually cooling incresingly dense air until the engine needs it. I'm sure there's a technical reason why this is a load of crap, I'm just waiting for some bright spark to point out what it is

Cosie Convert

It may help to think of the engine as a big air pump. A turbo engine is a 3 stage air pump. Stage 1 turbo compressor, stage 2 reciprocating piston pump and stage 3 exhaust turbine. The more you can pump through stage 1 + 2 the more power you can make. Stage 3 is a necessary evil and you want as little restriction there as possible.