There was a time (specifically, around the 1960s, the Muscle Car Era) when the easiest and most effective way to make a car go fast was to put a huge engine in it. This was effective because gas was cheap. Of course, times change and gas is much more expensive today. The practicality of dropping a big-block engine into a car has all but disappeared, but the desire to drive a fast car remains. This is where, among other things, forced induction comes in. Turbochargers and superchargers allow engine builders to get much more power out of an engine without increasing the size of the engine.
A fire requires three things to burn: fuel, air and a spark. This is known as the combustion triangle and if you remove any corner of it, it collapses. If you wish to create a bigger, hotter fire, you need to improve all three corners of it. Turbochargers and superchargers, collectively known as forced induction systems, focus on the ‘air’ corner of the combustion that goes on inside your engine.
You see, it is very easy to increase the amount of fuel that is pumped into your engine. There is already a mechanism for that in every car on the road. When you build a car, it is just as easy to install a high-flow pump and high-flow injectors as it is to install their low flowing equivalents. You can cram as much fuel into an engine’s cylinders as you want, it’s just not going to do you any good if there isn’t enough air to burn it all. That’s what forced induction does, it forces more air into the cylinders. More air means that you can cram in more fuel. More fuel means bigger bangs and bigger bangs means a faster car. Neat.
Both forced induction systems were originally developed for airplanes operating at high altitude. Air becomes less dense the higher up you go, so those lovely airplane engineers who are vastly more intelligent than I am, came up with forced induction systems. These allowed pilots to fly high without their engines starving for air, sputtering, and dying. At some point, someone must have thought “if these things allow planes to operate normally at higher and higher altitudes, I wonder what would happen if I put one on my car and continued to drive it on the ground?” And so that’s what they did.
Tune in tomorrow for part two of this (probably) three part series where we address the difference between turbos and superchargers. In part three, we will decide which one you want and answer the twin related questions of ‘What the heck is an intercooler?’ and ‘How do I prevent my engine from melting into a useless blob of metal?”
