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Re: Electric Supercharger
not for me but maybe for a 1000cc motorcycle.
I just read an article that showed if you sold your vehicle that gets from 10-14 mpg for a vehicle that gets 30mpg and spent an additional $10,000 it the would take in most instances over four years to recoup the $10,000..
Electric superchargers have been out for a long time and in the automotive world they are a joke. Let me explain:
People have no concept of how much power a modern engine produces when compared to a electric motor. The supercharger on the fj will eat 35hp at moderate boost levels. Sure the net result is a power increase, however if the supercharger was driven by a electric motor, you would see a even greater gain in power (all a super charger is at a basic level is a high volume low to medium pressure air compressor). It's long been thought that adding a electric motor to drive a supercharger would be the be all end all solution to gain more power and better efficiency. It's not going to work though, and that's simple math. If it takes a engine 35 hp to turn a supercharger to produce a 100 to 140whp gain, it's going to take a 35hp electric motor to provide the same power. A 35hp electric motor will not fit under the hood and would require 2,000 amps at 12.5 volt worth of power.
Even turbochargers (which are way more efficient then a supercharger) require a tremendous amount of energy (in the form of exhaust gas from a engine that's nothing more then a large air compressor itself). Even if you made some sort of 100% efficient electric drive centrifugal blower, it will never be able to provide enough volume or pressure to make anything but one or two hp and possibly slightly better fuel economy.
A large shop air compressor with a 7hp motor would draw 400 amps at 12.5 volts. And that compressor could not even produce enough volume at 7psi for a 1.8 Honda motor. A leaf blower could provide a larger volume of air, but at full engine throttle it wouldn't even be able to produce .25 psi on that same Honda motor (it would become a restriction). There is not free lunch.
Btw the fjs 265hp engine is equal (at max output) to 197,600 watts of electrical energy. That wattage at 12.5 volts is equal to 15,800 amps draw. The same amp pull as running 34 big winches at once, at 100% max pull.
Greggry, same was said about electric motors being used to replace shock absorbers when it came to issues related to response time not to long ago. Been used in the application since 08 for active suspensions, but nothing on the commercial side yet.
Expensive sure, feasible in the future, I beleive so. Just a matter of technology progressing. Judging that some OEMs have bought in for certain applications I see it moving that way which only benefits automotive enthusiasts in the future as another option
This is the electric motor it would take to power the supercharger on the fj to directly replace bing crank driven. MARATHON ELECTRIC Hazardous Loc Mtr,3 Ph,TEFC,40 HP,T3B - 6KWH6 - Grainger Industrial Supply. 40hp motor that bigger then half the size of the engine. And at 3phase 460 volt it pulls almost 50 amps. Brought down to a very inefficient 12.5 volts and your talking a easy 1,800 amps worth of power. You would have to run much higher voltage otherwise your power cable would be unreal.
Even if you used a electric supercharger that could produce the volume and pressure needed to replace a normal blower on a car, and it only used 7hp, your still talking 400+ amps at 12.5 volts. That's 400 amps anytime the motor is under 100% max load. You would have to have 500amps minimum of alternator power to run a system like that. Hopefully this opened your eyes a bit.
If you want Forced Induction but not the expense, I imagine you could go with a simple dry nitrous system. I never see much discussion about the FJ and N20.
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2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser
"Naomi"
Bullwinkle
Linear Mode
