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