by GlassWolf » Sat Apr 02, 2005 11:42 pm
Pretty much what Jon said.
Firstly, most turbochargers need a certain amount of exhaust velocity to spin the turbine that drives teh impeller shaft to compress air and force it back into the engine. In order to get enough compression to make good boost, you need the turbo snail to be of a certain size. You couldn't really reach that sort of output with a turbo on each cylinder. Also, you'd run into a similar problem to what we see when over-carbureting a motor using small single barrell carbs per cylinder. a motor set up with small dedicated carbs has to use one carb per cylinder and one carb or barrell per runner with separate intake manifolds. This proves to be far less efficient than using a shared plenum intake manifold with say, a single 4bbl or dual quads forcing large amounts of air and fuel into a "community" chamber then allowing each runner to suck in as much air/fuel as it needs per cylinder or set fo cylinders (depends on manifold design)
Weber downdrafts encountered this problem on some earlier English engines that had dedicated runners and carbs, and actually lost power because of it. The same sort of thing would happen with separate turbos.
One reason twin turbos are used is to put one turbo on each half of the engine, and thus use smaller turbos so they'll spool faster without the need to provide as much boost per turbo, but there are pros and cons to both large and small turbos that I won't delve into just now as it's not directly relevant.
Simply put, a turbocharger works by scavenging the expended heat and velocity of exhaust gases. The more exhaust the turbo can use, the more boost you're going to be able to get from it, so if that turbo has to divide up the finite amount of expelled gases, it's not going to be able to produce as much resultant output.
It's like having a limited amount of food, and being given the choice of feeding one strong worker, or a bunch of weaker workers. each of the little workers will use a larger percentage of the food because a person, regardless of size needs to eat a certain amount of food to sustain life and health, so you'll get less work and more resources used to do so. Efficiency suffers.
Pretty much what Jon said.
Firstly, most turbochargers need a certain amount of exhaust velocity to spin the turbine that drives teh impeller shaft to compress air and force it back into the engine. In order to get enough compression to make good boost, you need the turbo snail to be of a certain size. You couldn't really reach that sort of output with a turbo on each cylinder. Also, you'd run into a similar problem to what we see when over-carbureting a motor using small single barrell carbs per cylinder. a motor set up with small dedicated carbs has to use one carb per cylinder and one carb or barrell per runner with separate intake manifolds. This proves to be far less efficient than using a shared plenum intake manifold with say, a single 4bbl or dual quads forcing large amounts of air and fuel into a "community" chamber then allowing each runner to suck in as much air/fuel as it needs per cylinder or set fo cylinders (depends on manifold design)
Weber downdrafts encountered this problem on some earlier English engines that had dedicated runners and carbs, and actually lost power because of it. The same sort of thing would happen with separate turbos.
One reason twin turbos are used is to put one turbo on each half of the engine, and thus use smaller turbos so they'll spool faster without the need to provide as much boost per turbo, but there are pros and cons to both large and small turbos that I won't delve into just now as it's not directly relevant.
Simply put, a turbocharger works by scavenging the expended heat and velocity of exhaust gases. The more exhaust the turbo can use, the more boost you're going to be able to get from it, so if that turbo has to divide up the finite amount of expelled gases, it's not going to be able to produce as much resultant output.
It's like having a limited amount of food, and being given the choice of feeding one strong worker, or a bunch of weaker workers. each of the little workers will use a larger percentage of the food because a person, regardless of size needs to eat a certain amount of food to sustain life and health, so you'll get less work and more resources used to do so. Efficiency suffers.