The Aero-Thermodynamic Possibilities of Increasing Turbocharging Efficiency

Abstract

Turbocharging is a basic possibility to increase the utilization of reciprocating internal combustion engines. It can be stated that reciprocating engines of more than 100kW nominal power are oftenequipped with turbochargers and in most of the cases they also feature an intercooler. In order to be able to investigate the possibility of turbocharger development, one has to thoroughly discover the methods for improvement.

In the present article an investigation is carried out to obtain the dependence of efficiency of turbocharging on the aero-thermodynamic properties of the turbocharger. Present paper covers partially – as an overview – the previous results of turbocharger development while its aim is to provide guidelines for the possible upper limits of turbocharging in the automotive industry. The research does not include special fields of application (e.g. racing engines with extremely high acceleration) with especially highly supercharged reciprocating engines.

In order to reduce the complexity of the relationships under investigation only those parameters are considered as variables that have a significant effect on the efficiency of turbocharging.