Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens him Marshall Brain with today's question, what
Speaker 1: is the difference between a turbocharger and a supercharger on
Speaker 1: a car's engine. Let's start with the similarities. Both turbo
Speaker 1: chargers and superchargers are called forced induction systems. They compress
Speaker 1: the air flowing into the engine. The advantage of compressing
Speaker 1: the air is that it lets the engine stuff more
Speaker 1: air into a cylinder, and more air means that more
Speaker 1: fuel can be stuffed into so you get more power
Speaker 1: from each cylinder. A turbo or a supercharged engine produces
Speaker 1: more power overall than the same engine without the charging.
Speaker 1: The typical boost provided by either a turbocharger or a
Speaker 1: supercharger is six to eight pounds per square inch. Since
Speaker 1: normal atmospheric pressure is fourteen point seven p s i
Speaker 1: at sea level, you can see that you're getting about
Speaker 1: fifty more air into the engine. Therefore, you would expect
Speaker 1: to get more power. It's not perfectly efficient, so you
Speaker 1: might get a thirty or forty improvement instead. The key
Speaker 1: difference between a turbocharger and a supercharger is its power supply.
Speaker 1: Something has to supply the power to run the air compressor.
Speaker 1: In a supercharger, there's a belt that connects directly to
Speaker 1: the engine. It gets its power the same way that
Speaker 1: a water pump or an alternator does. A turbocharger, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, gets its power from the exhaust stream.
Speaker 1: The exhaust runs through a turbine, which in turn spins
Speaker 1: the compressor. There are tradeoffs in both systems. In theory,
Speaker 1: a turbocharger is more efficient because it's using the wasted
Speaker 1: energy in the exhaustream for its power source. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, a turbocharger causes some amount of back pressure
Speaker 1: in the exhaust system and tends to provide less boost
Speaker 1: until the engine is running at higher RPMs. Superchargers are
Speaker 1: easier to install, but they tend to be more expensive.
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