dont know if this belongs here but figured fab guys would be intrested


This is nothing new, and actually proposed to F1 back in the mid-20th century when they were turbocharged. The Comprex blower combines the best of both worlds. The Comprex is both exhaust gas and belt driven. It uses the belt off the crank to keep boost constant and uses the hot exhaust gas to spin the vanes inside the blower, while drawing in cold outside air. Unlike a turbo though, it reuses the exhaust gas, some of it at least. So if you run the engine nice and rich, you can reburn the unspent fuel after it has been compressed:


"Because the Comprex vanes only act to distribute gases, not push them, power is only needed to overcome friction of the rotating parts.

Now, take a model piston engine. Let it spin a small Comprex blower which blows into a ramjet-type combustor. There you have a simple hybrid jet engine that would work at very low and very high air speeds relatively happily.

You would just have to juggle the engine/blower/combustor dimensions carefully so that the engine is just big enough to do its job, and does not produce surplus shaft power.

There's more. Bleed some of the compressed air back to the piston engine to boost its power, so that you can use a small engine to turn a relatively big blower. (Comprex can spin at very high speeds as its vanes are of small diameter.)

Properly, you should run the engine as rich as it will take. After it has done the job of compressing air, exhaust gas is ejected into the ramjet/combustor, where it mixes with fresh air coming from the compressor. As it is still rich with unburned fuel, it only combusts properly in the ramjet. Fuel is injected into the combustor just to top the mixture up so to say. This way, because of recirculation, you also get a relatively clean exhaust.

Sounds complex, but need not be complex in practice.

Similar hybrids have worked really well in the past. Perhaps the most complex in history was the 12-cylinder 2-stroke (!) supercharged aircraft diesel (!) engine built by Napier in the (I think) early 60s. It burned super-rich mixture and blew its exhaust gas into combustors of a small turboshaft. More fuel was injected here and the resulting hot gas drove a turbine, which turned an axial compressor, which blew both into the 12-cylinder piston engine and into the combustors of the turboshaft. The two output shafts (of the piston engine and the turboshaft) were geared together to turn a single output shaft, which turned the aircraft propeller. It sounds incredibly complex but worked very well indeed and was a very fuel-efficient engine by the standards of the times.

Keith Duckworth, the constructor of the most successful car racing engine of all times, the Cosworth V8, proposed the same layout for Formula 1 back in the days of turbocharged F1 engines. He said it was the most logical extension of the turbocharged piston engine idea."

did some research and found these links
http://www.swissauto.com/uploa....pdf
http://www.swissauto.com/uploa....pdf
http://www.swissauto.com/uploa....pdf

any more info would be good i cant even figure out where you could buy one

 

This post deserves a reply. ilsimsli, your links above are broken.

I have looked into pressure wave superchargers. They are for certain the next level of forced induction. They have never been mass produced, except for some rare european models.

For anyone actually reading this post, here are the references:

http://www.imrt.ethz.ch/resear...ssure
http://www.swissauto.com/e/pro....html

If you want more papers and links, just Google "pressure wave supercharger"


The best possibility of actually owning one is for some US company to contact Swissauto AG. They have a modern version of this supercharger they call the Hyprex. Someone with a legit business enterprise here would have to negotiate with them to build the units, and have them shipped here. I'm also not sure their Hyprex is suited for 2.0L+ engines, since the supercharger design changes according to displacement.

It is something worth doing though. Any import company actually able to sell these units to the aftermarket would put all turbo companies out of business in short order. These superchargers are so efficient they make turbos look like a Model T.

 

anyone else?

 

mazda built a 626 with a diesel pressure wave supercharged engine

 

these look very interesting

 

good read here is more https://www.rdb.ethz.ch/projec...rds=1

 

good read

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by DC2.0 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">good read </TD></TR></TABLE>


very good read.

 

dang, this is really something different. i was wondering, i see those vanes get pushed by the exhaust which compress the intake charge, but what pushes the vanes back to the exhaust side for the next rotation? thinking that the exhaust always has higher pressure than the intake side, it seems that once the vanes are pushed to the intake side, they would stay there. thanks for the assistance
-quikflip

 

the belt pushes the intake charge back i think

 

someone with the funds should strap one of these on a honda if i had the the cash i would try it but im not that ballin lol

 

seems like there would be a lot of heat generated there...

 

there was actually an article about it in the May Sport Compact Magazine. it seemed pretty interesting but from what i understood it was too expensive and tedious to produce because you cant just "bolt it onto a manifold and throw piping at it. also the rotor, drum and port dimensions all need to be tailored specifically for a given engine." according to the magazine. it would definately be something fun to mess with though

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by hdsi94 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">there was actually an article about it in the May Sport Compact Magazine.</TD></TR></TABLE>
Are you sure about this? I scoured the SCC website, and I can't find any reference to pressure wave supercharging at all. Are you sure you referenced the right magazine?

Thanks.

 

yeah, i'm pretty sure, the magazine is sitting on my dresser. Sport Compact Car for May, 2007. The article title is "The Comprex: The Other Compressor". I checked the website too, there is no reference to it, it might be because it was an editorial written by Jay Chen.

 

yea i saw the artical not much info in there though

 

Cool, never seen those before, anyone know where I could find one of those mazda units? Or does anyone have any real pictures of the actual unit?

 

funnily enougth one of these cropped on on uk ebay the other day....if only i had some wonga :lol:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/SUPERCHA...wItem

sickening it only went for a hundred quid (works out to be around $180-190 u.s)

chap seems to shift a few looking at his past auctions

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by redsolturbo &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">funnily enougth one of these cropped on on uk ebay the other day....if only i had some wonga :lol:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/SUPERCHA...wItem

sickening it only went for a hundred quid (works out to be around $180-190 u.s)

chap seems to shift a few looking at his past auctions

</TD></TR></TABLE>
OMG, someone needs to buy this. I had no idea these units were even mass produced. I wonder where these units are coming from???

I would buy these units right away, but I haven't started my new job yet .

 

for 102$ u cant beat that..