|
The term "blower" is slang for some type of "supercharger". Superchargers come in a veriety of designs that are designated as positive displacement such as Roots, Miller and vane types or variable displacement as centrifugal or axial compressors. They come in a couple methods of drive, mechanical being power taken from the crankshaft or turbo where exhaust gas energy turns a turbine wheel to spin the compressor.
Generally positive displacement blowers turn close to crankshaft speeds where variable displacement blowers need much higher speeds some upwards of a 100,000 RPM to be efficient.
You can stack blowers, there are many industrial and truck applications where a turbo centrifugal compressor feeds a crankshaft driven roots.
WW II era aircraft engines, the Merlin as a case in point, used miltiple stages and multiple speeds of crank driven centrifugal compressors. Many radial engined airplanes such as the B-17 and the P-47 used a turbo ahead of a single stage, multiple speed centrifugal compressor. And many of these also had water alcohol and often nitrous on top of the blowers. Aircraft piston engine supercharger technology led directly into the jet engine. The jet is really nothing more than a turbo charger with the piston engine removed and a combustion chamber fitted between the compressor outlet and the exhaust inlet. The big Wright 3350 radials (yes that's cubic inches) had a turbo compound engine where exhaust gases were fed through turbines that were gear connected to the crankshaft before the exhaust went on to a turbocharger. In this arraingment, 3 geared turbos returned 900 horsepower to the crank. That's how much energy goes out the exhaust, totally wasted.
Multi stage blowers require an intercooler between them to reduce air temperature, otherwise detonation goes out of control as detonation is extremely sensitive to inlet air temperature at the intake valve.
So, yes you can run multiple "blowers" of any type you can get in the engine compartment. The problem gets to be one of space, heat, and how much pressure you can put on the engine before parts come out. Once over 5/6 pounds of boost, you gotta think of parts in terms of forged and billet, materials in terms of chrome steel and titainium. All it takes is money.
Mechanically driven centrifugal or axial blowers have never been as effective in race cars such as the Novi of the 1950s and 60s as they were in airplanes. The problem being that car engines are always up and down in RPMs and this isn't a very efficient way to run these designs. Roots move lots of air but take a lot of space, are heavy and don't care much for high revs, plus a backfire will blow them apart often even with a safety valve in place. Vane types are inexpensive to manufacture, but don't like high revs, wear quickly and don't scale up well for large displacement engines like American V-8s. Plus all these designs suck horsepower right off the crankshaft.
Turbos suffer from lag at low speeds and overspeed at high engine speeds. The solution to one end of the spectrum is opposed to what you want at the other, so you end up with some pretty fancy controls or a huge compromise on achievable performance.
Bogie
Edited 9/28/2005 4:45 pm by oldBogie
|