Turbocharger

When the talk is about fast cars, there is one word which can pretty much sum up the speed, it’s called turbocharger. This word can usually be found next to the engine capacity detailing how significantly it has boosted the mill’s power. Most of us are content thinking that it is something that helps an engine to perform better but not many are aware of its true functions.

A turbocharger is basically short for a turbine-driven supercharger. In the simplest of terms, it is just a pump that pumps in more air into the engine, instead of the engine sucking in air on its own.What this does is, help the engine get more air for combustion and improves the efficiency of the engine. Some of us might wonder (and so did I), whether the turbocharger by improving combustion, increases fuel consumption. Well it does, it’s as simple as that. By increasing power we reduce the fuel efficiency. Hence the turbocharger is a peripheral that is used often in sports and high performance cars. It is also used in diesel engines to increase the power of the engines so as to produce higher power-to-weight ratios. This ratio can be illustrated with an example:Let us consider a car that weighs 1,000 kgs and delivers 15bhp, hence the power-to-weight ratio is 150 hp/ton. With the help of a turbocharger on a diesel engine it is possible to increase the ratio hence enabling the vehicle to carry moreload, making the turbine an essential component in today’s goods vehicles and other large vehicles.

It may look like the turbocharger must be a complicated mechanical wonder that is embedded with integrated circuits and controlled by computers to do all that it does. Not exactly. If we could actually consider the working of the turbocharger, we would be amazed at its simplicity. It’s just a couple of turbines which have fins in opposite directions at either ends of a shaft. One end is connected to the exhaust of the engine which turns a turbine, hence the other turbine which is situated at the other end of the shaft is placed before the inlet manifold to bring in more air into the engine and this is how the mill’s exhausts determine its intake. This sometimes leads to a delay in the functioning of the turbochargerand like all other additions to the engine, this component too has its fair share of pros and cons. It’s however a choice that one can make depending on the kind of car that one may want.

A lot of us are left divided between the two segments of cars, those that are efficient and those that are powerful. Considering the scenario of cars in India, we would be stupid not to observe that the economic and small-sized cars have a better chance of survival and success here than the ones with performance and power. Hence the primary difference between these cars would be the inclusion of the turbocharger and the other cosmetic changes. This is an amazing piece of machinery which as an add-on has helped refine, re-engineer and improve the performance of the engine which has in itself not undergone a lot of changes.