**Supercharging: Understanding the Basics**

A supercharger is a device that compresses air and forces it into an engine's combustion chamber, allowing for increased power and performance. In the context of electric vehicles, a supercharger can be used to enhance boost pressure without the need for a traditional internal combustion engine.

In conventional gasoline-powered vehicles, a centrifugal supercharger uses a crank belt to rotate an impeller, which pulls in air and passes it through an air-to-water intercooler before being drawn into the intake manifold. This design requires the supercharger to spool up quickly at high engine speeds to provide useful boost pressure. However, this also means that the torque curve is heavily weighted towards the top end of the engine's operating range.

In contrast, electric vehicles can utilize a centrifugal supercharger without the need for engine RPM to generate boost pressure. Instead, energy from a battery is used to power an alternator, which in turn powers the motor that drives the impeller. This allows the supercharger to operate at any speed, providing immediate response and flexibility in terms of torque curve shaping.

**Centrifugal Supercharger Installation: A Visual Example**

As an example, I can personally attest to the simplicity of installing a centrifugal supercharger on my Honda S2000. The setup consists of a crank belt that rotates an impeller, which pulls in air through an air-to-water intercooler and then into the intake manifold. This design provides a relatively straightforward installation process, with plenty of space available for the system in most vehicles.

However, it's worth noting that centrifugal superchargers can be more challenging to install than other types of superchargers, such as roots or twin-screw designs. The impeller requires precise calibration and tuning to optimize performance, which can add complexity to the installation process.

**Electric Supercharger Advantages**

One significant advantage of electric superchargers is their flexibility in terms of torque curve shaping. Unlike conventional centrifugal superchargers, which are limited by engine RPM, an electric supercharger can provide boost pressure at any speed. This makes it ideal for applications where instant torque and responsiveness are critical.

Furthermore, an electric supercharger allows the user to tailor the torque curve to suit specific driving conditions. For example, in stop-and-go traffic, the battery can be charged using energy generated by braking, reducing wear on the engine and improving fuel efficiency.

**Electric Supercharger Disadvantages**

While electric superchargers offer many advantages, there are also some significant drawbacks to consider. One of the main challenges is the cost and complexity of adding an electric supercharger system to a vehicle. A 48-volt battery system is typically required to provide sufficient power for boost pressure, which can add weight and complexity to the vehicle.

Additionally, electric superchargers require specialized components, such as high-capacity batteries and beefier alternators, which can be expensive. These systems also require careful tuning and calibration to optimize performance, adding another layer of complexity to the installation process.

**Real-World Examples**

Electric superchargers have already been successfully implemented in a number of production vehicles, including the Koenigsegg CCX and Audi SQ7. While these applications are relatively rare, they demonstrate the feasibility and potential benefits of electric supercharger technology.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, both centrifugal and electric superchargers offer unique advantages and disadvantages when it comes to enhancing performance in gasoline-powered vehicles. Centrifugal superchargers provide efficient boost pressure but require engine RPM to operate effectively, while electric superchargers offer flexibility and instant torque but come with added complexity and cost.

By understanding the intricacies of these technologies, enthusiasts and manufacturers can make informed decisions about which type of supercharger best suits their needs. Whether you're looking to squeeze every last bit of performance from your existing engine or seeking a cutting-edge solution for your next project vehicle, electric superchargers are definitely worth exploring.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're gonna be talking about four different types of superchargers routes twin screw centrifugal and electric superchargers no not that kind now first off a big thank you to eBay Motors for sponsoring this video we'll get more into that at the end of the video but know that there is a link in the video description to download the eBay Motors app now all superchargers are used as a method of packing more air into the engine so that you can make more powers so to start off let's look at routes and twin screw style superchargers as the overall layout of them is fairly similar so you'll have your air come in through the intake pass through the throttle body travel through the supercharger which is driven off a belt from the engine so that's what's going to be rotating this compressor and then that air is sent through an inner core in this case an air to water intercooler so you've got a radiator up front that's circulating coolant to this intercooler there's passing through travels into the engine and then out the exhaust so the overall layout of these two styles of supercharger is basically the same however the mechanics of what's going on inside is quite different and so starting off with the route style supercharger you have two routers inside these are of course being driven by the crankshaft through a belt which then rotates a gearing mechanism which will rotate both of these rotors now at the entrance of this route supercharger the rotors are rotating away from each other so you have that air coming in and then gets sealed against the body of that housing in side the supercharger and then it's passed down below it and then as you can see these rotors mesh together so they prevent any air from coming back up to the intake with a twin screw style you have two different rotors here and so one mesh is within the other and it compresses that air along that rotor to the back of it so the air comes in it gets compressed down through that rotor and then forced out the back and then that compressed air exits below and so this is not compressing air inside of it versus this is compressing air within the supercharger itself now I have an egg and part of a toilet paper roll to help explain this further so with the route style supercharger basically just have a pocket that you allow air to fill and then you transfer that pocket of air down below the supercharger and then the lobe from the other rotor meshes with it so no air can escape back up past these rotors then you take in some more air and once again you deposit it below with the twin-screw supercharger what you're doing is closing off that air towards the back of the rotor so basically it's compressing that air within the rotor and then it deposits it below so it takes in air from above compresses that air drops it below takes in air from above compresses that air drops it below so while the screw-type supercharger compresses the air within the supercharger the root style supercharger is simply providing more air below it than the engine can take in so that manifold builds up pressure within it so now let's look at a couple of actual examples first up is a routes supercharger made by Eaton used in the new Shelby gt500 you'll notice that it has a four lobe design instead of three and the high twist with 160 degree lobes air comes in through the throttle travels over to the rotors is then discharged above the rotors passes through an intercooler and then over and down to the individual intake runners at low loads when you don't need boost the air can skip the rotors by traveling through a bypass valve so that the supercharger has minimal impact on fuel economy for example while cruising on the highway and here's a look inside a twin screw style supercharger used on the Dodge Hellcat engines made by IHI air comes in through the throttle is compressed by the rotors travels up into a chamber and then down through an intercooler before traveling down the intake runners to the individual cylinders this example also has a bypass valve for low load operation both of the supercharger examples shown also have the rotors mounted upside down so the rotors themselves are lower reducing the engine center of gravity another example of a more old-school style of route superchargers are the massive ones used in Top Fuel Drag Racing three lobes a small amount of twist and these actually have apex seals to operate more efficiently of course since the seals touch the rotors the service life is much shorter but in racing that's much less of an issue now both routes and twin-screw supercharger x' artist scribed as positive-displacement superchargers and what that means is a fixed amount of air goes through with each revolution and so what this is great for is that it means your torque curve is pretty wide it's effective you get effective boost across a wide range of engine rpm so if you were to look at torque versus rpm and before it was this ideal flat line basically all you're doing is just bumping up that torque curve and you get a benefit in boost not only on the low end but also mid and top end so some of the advantages and disadvantages of each both of these offering you that wide torque curve which is great the twin screws do tend to be a bit more efficient however you know there's been a lot of modern advances with route style superchargers like those four lobe designs 160 degree twist bypass valves and so they're actually advancing and they're able to get thermal efficiencies above 70 percent with these route style superchargers downside really to both of them being packaging the location of where they must go and the overall size of them they're pretty large pretty hefty and then for these twin screw style superchargers if there's not a bypass valve well then it's always going to be compressing air any air that travels through this twin-screw supercharger is going to be compressed and so no matter what as you compress air it heats up so if you don't have a bypass and you do push air through it you are gonna be raising the temperatures some examples of some cars that these are used on route style super characters you can find of course on the gt500 that we were showing on the Corvette zr1 Lotus Evora s and this is a route style supercharger that will be going on my mx-5 now for the twin-screw supercharger of course this is going on all of the Dodge Hellcats it was also used on the previous generation for JT moving on to centrifugal and electric style superchargers these are a lot like turbochargers except instead of having the exhaust gases drive the compressor now you either have an electric motor doing it or it is driven off of an engine belt and so here we're looking at the overall diagram but again that basic concept of simply using an impeller which is either driven by the engine or driven by an electric motor spinning up that impeller pulling in the air throwing that air to the sides of this housing and then eventually it exits threw and heads over to the engine so the air comes in through the intake travels through that compressor through an intercooler could be air to water or air to air sent up front through the throttle body into the engine and then out the exhaust so we're kind of looking at both scenarios here and you would have one or the other in purple we have that purely mechanical system being driven off of the engine belt you wouldn't have that engine belt going all the way to the supercharger in the electric version you would simply use the engine belt to power an alternator that alternator would power a battery the battery would then send energy to a motor which spools up your pump and then you get higher pressure boost within the engine now as a visual example a centrifugal supercharger is what I installed on my Honda s2000 and the setup is pretty simple you have a crank belt rotate the impeller which pulls in the air it passes through an air to water intercooler and then into the intake manifold now unlike the roots and twin screw style superchargers these are not positive displacement pumps which means they need to spool up really fast they need to spin very fast in order to actually provide useful boost and so with your centrifugal style supercharger if you look at the torque versus rpm curve what happens is at low rpm you're really not building any boost it has to wait until the engine is all the way wound up and so then this will be spinning much faster now you can use gearing to help out here so that the impeller rotates much faster than your engine rpm but even still you're only going to reach your peak boost at peak rpm so it really shifts your torque curve to the top end instead of benefiting the bottom end like you get with a positive displacement pump now if you're using an electric supercharger of this same style well it doesn't matter what your engine rpm is it simply matters how much energy do you have in your battery so if you've got plenty of energy in your battery you can spool up that motor whenever you want and thus produce boost wherever you want so as long as you have power as long as you have energy stored in that battery you can make your torque curve look like whatever you want as long as the motor and the battery have the power to do it so you can get great bottom end you can get immediate response and you can make it look like whatever you want so some of the pros and cons here centrifugal style tends to be an efficient style of supercharger does allow for really high boost however of course that's all at the top-end packaging flexibility is great it's a small system you know in my s2000 there was plenty of space for it and you have flexibility in where it goes also allows for flexibility in using an intercooler up front or if you want to use an air to water intercooler of course in downside being that torque curve and also some of these do use engine oil and so you'll have a return from that supercharger to the oil pan versus some of the other methods the roots and twin screwed they will often have their own contained oil systems that don't need to be changed out all that regularly as far as the electric style supercharger of course the big advantage being the flexibility with that torque curve another advantage of being efficiency and that kind of depends is it efficient to use an engine to power an alternator to charge a battery to send that energy to a motor and then spool of that compressor no not necessarily however there are scenarios where you can charge this battery basically for free let's say you're at a high speed and you're coming down to a stop well you can use that scenario the engine is going to be spinning no matter what even if it's not injecting fuel so you can use that engine to power the alternator to charge up that battery while you're coming to a stop basically for free you're charging up this battery and then you can use that energy to power the motor so in stop-and-go scenarios you can actually charge these things very efficiently and get back some energy that you otherwise would have simply lost either way now some disadvantages of course being the cost and complexity of adding this system on you're going to need a 48 volt system so that you can get the kind of power you need to actually build useful boost pressures and there's of course a weight associated with adding all of this complexity as well and the battery's alternator the beefier alternator and the motor associated with it now some examples of cars that use these you can find centrifugal supercharger sexualy there's two of them that go on the Koenigsegg CCX an electric supercharger being used on the Audi s q7 and again a huge thank you to eBay Motors for sponsoring the video you can download their app using the link in the video description and they've recently added some new features to the app so that you can natively bid and also chat with the seller right through the app another great feature of eBay Motors is that they have av cool protection plan which covers up to $100,000 for vehicle non-delivery missing title or significant undisclosed defects so you can be confident in getting what you pay for happy bidding and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we're gonna be talking about four different types of superchargers routes twin screw centrifugal and electric superchargers no not that kind now first off a big thank you to eBay Motors for sponsoring this video we'll get more into that at the end of the video but know that there is a link in the video description to download the eBay Motors app now all superchargers are used as a method of packing more air into the engine so that you can make more powers so to start off let's look at routes and twin screw style superchargers as the overall layout of them is fairly similar so you'll have your air come in through the intake pass through the throttle body travel through the supercharger which is driven off a belt from the engine so that's what's going to be rotating this compressor and then that air is sent through an inner core in this case an air to water intercooler so you've got a radiator up front that's circulating coolant to this intercooler there's passing through travels into the engine and then out the exhaust so the overall layout of these two styles of supercharger is basically the same however the mechanics of what's going on inside is quite different and so starting off with the route style supercharger you have two routers inside these are of course being driven by the crankshaft through a belt which then rotates a gearing mechanism which will rotate both of these rotors now at the entrance of this route supercharger the rotors are rotating away from each other so you have that air coming in and then gets sealed against the body of that housing in side the supercharger and then it's passed down below it and then as you can see these rotors mesh together so they prevent any air from coming back up to the intake with a twin screw style you have two different rotors here and so one mesh is within the other and it compresses that air along that rotor to the back of it so the air comes in it gets compressed down through that rotor and then forced out the back and then that compressed air exits below and so this is not compressing air inside of it versus this is compressing air within the supercharger itself now I have an egg and part of a toilet paper roll to help explain this further so with the route style supercharger basically just have a pocket that you allow air to fill and then you transfer that pocket of air down below the supercharger and then the lobe from the other rotor meshes with it so no air can escape back up past these rotors then you take in some more air and once again you deposit it below with the twin-screw supercharger what you're doing is closing off that air towards the back of the rotor so basically it's compressing that air within the rotor and then it deposits it below so it takes in air from above compresses that air drops it below takes in air from above compresses that air drops it below so while the screw-type supercharger compresses the air within the supercharger the root style supercharger is simply providing more air below it than the engine can take in so that manifold builds up pressure within it so now let's look at a couple of actual examples first up is a routes supercharger made by Eaton used in the new Shelby gt500 you'll notice that it has a four lobe design instead of three and the high twist with 160 degree lobes air comes in through the throttle travels over to the rotors is then discharged above the rotors passes through an intercooler and then over and down to the individual intake runners at low loads when you don't need boost the air can skip the rotors by traveling through a bypass valve so that the supercharger has minimal impact on fuel economy for example while cruising on the highway and here's a look inside a twin screw style supercharger used on the Dodge Hellcat engines made by IHI air comes in through the throttle is compressed by the rotors travels up into a chamber and then down through an intercooler before traveling down the intake runners to the individual cylinders this example also has a bypass valve for low load operation both of the supercharger examples shown also have the rotors mounted upside down so the rotors themselves are lower reducing the engine center of gravity another example of a more old-school style of route superchargers are the massive ones used in Top Fuel Drag Racing three lobes a small amount of twist and these actually have apex seals to operate more efficiently of course since the seals touch the rotors the service life is much shorter but in racing that's much less of an issue now both routes and twin-screw supercharger x' artist scribed as positive-displacement superchargers and what that means is a fixed amount of air goes through with each revolution and so what this is great for is that it means your torque curve is pretty wide it's effective you get effective boost across a wide range of engine rpm so if you were to look at torque versus rpm and before it was this ideal flat line basically all you're doing is just bumping up that torque curve and you get a benefit in boost not only on the low end but also mid and top end so some of the advantages and disadvantages of each both of these offering you that wide torque curve which is great the twin screws do tend to be a bit more efficient however you know there's been a lot of modern advances with route style superchargers like those four lobe designs 160 degree twist bypass valves and so they're actually advancing and they're able to get thermal efficiencies above 70 percent with these route style superchargers downside really to both of them being packaging the location of where they must go and the overall size of them they're pretty large pretty hefty and then for these twin screw style superchargers if there's not a bypass valve well then it's always going to be compressing air any air that travels through this twin-screw supercharger is going to be compressed and so no matter what as you compress air it heats up so if you don't have a bypass and you do push air through it you are gonna be raising the temperatures some examples of some cars that these are used on route style super characters you can find of course on the gt500 that we were showing on the Corvette zr1 Lotus Evora s and this is a route style supercharger that will be going on my mx-5 now for the twin-screw supercharger of course this is going on all of the Dodge Hellcats it was also used on the previous generation for JT moving on to centrifugal and electric style superchargers these are a lot like turbochargers except instead of having the exhaust gases drive the compressor now you either have an electric motor doing it or it is driven off of an engine belt and so here we're looking at the overall diagram but again that basic concept of simply using an impeller which is either driven by the engine or driven by an electric motor spinning up that impeller pulling in the air throwing that air to the sides of this housing and then eventually it exits threw and heads over to the engine so the air comes in through the intake travels through that compressor through an intercooler could be air to water or air to air sent up front through the throttle body into the engine and then out the exhaust so we're kind of looking at both scenarios here and you would have one or the other in purple we have that purely mechanical system being driven off of the engine belt you wouldn't have that engine belt going all the way to the supercharger in the electric version you would simply use the engine belt to power an alternator that alternator would power a battery the battery would then send energy to a motor which spools up your pump and then you get higher pressure boost within the engine now as a visual example a centrifugal supercharger is what I installed on my Honda s2000 and the setup is pretty simple you have a crank belt rotate the impeller which pulls in the air it passes through an air to water intercooler and then into the intake manifold now unlike the roots and twin screw style superchargers these are not positive displacement pumps which means they need to spool up really fast they need to spin very fast in order to actually provide useful boost and so with your centrifugal style supercharger if you look at the torque versus rpm curve what happens is at low rpm you're really not building any boost it has to wait until the engine is all the way wound up and so then this will be spinning much faster now you can use gearing to help out here so that the impeller rotates much faster than your engine rpm but even still you're only going to reach your peak boost at peak rpm so it really shifts your torque curve to the top end instead of benefiting the bottom end like you get with a positive displacement pump now if you're using an electric supercharger of this same style well it doesn't matter what your engine rpm is it simply matters how much energy do you have in your battery so if you've got plenty of energy in your battery you can spool up that motor whenever you want and thus produce boost wherever you want so as long as you have power as long as you have energy stored in that battery you can make your torque curve look like whatever you want as long as the motor and the battery have the power to do it so you can get great bottom end you can get immediate response and you can make it look like whatever you want so some of the pros and cons here centrifugal style tends to be an efficient style of supercharger does allow for really high boost however of course that's all at the top-end packaging flexibility is great it's a small system you know in my s2000 there was plenty of space for it and you have flexibility in where it goes also allows for flexibility in using an intercooler up front or if you want to use an air to water intercooler of course in downside being that torque curve and also some of these do use engine oil and so you'll have a return from that supercharger to the oil pan versus some of the other methods the roots and twin screwed they will often have their own contained oil systems that don't need to be changed out all that regularly as far as the electric style supercharger of course the big advantage being the flexibility with that torque curve another advantage of being efficiency and that kind of depends is it efficient to use an engine to power an alternator to charge a battery to send that energy to a motor and then spool of that compressor no not necessarily however there are scenarios where you can charge this battery basically for free let's say you're at a high speed and you're coming down to a stop well you can use that scenario the engine is going to be spinning no matter what even if it's not injecting fuel so you can use that engine to power the alternator to charge up that battery while you're coming to a stop basically for free you're charging up this battery and then you can use that energy to power the motor so in stop-and-go scenarios you can actually charge these things very efficiently and get back some energy that you otherwise would have simply lost either way now some disadvantages of course being the cost and complexity of adding this system on you're going to need a 48 volt system so that you can get the kind of power you need to actually build useful boost pressures and there's of course a weight associated with adding all of this complexity as well and the battery's alternator the beefier alternator and the motor associated with it now some examples of cars that use these you can find centrifugal supercharger sexualy there's two of them that go on the Koenigsegg CCX an electric supercharger being used on the Audi s q7 and again a huge thank you to eBay Motors for sponsoring the video you can download their app using the link in the video description and they've recently added some new features to the app so that you can natively bid and also chat with the seller right through the app another great feature of eBay Motors is that they have av cool protection plan which covers up to $100,000 for vehicle non-delivery missing title or significant undisclosed defects so you can be confident in getting what you pay for happy bidding and if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"