Why are turbochargers more efficient?

A turbocharger does two things. It recovers energy that would have been waisted out the tailpipe. It also increases air pressure and airflow through the engine. It is important to remember that internal combustion engines do not run on fuel. They run on air. The fuel is a catalyst to burn the oxygen in the air.

When a cylinder moves, the amount of space it takes up is called displacement. The ratio of most volume to least volume tells us the compression. The higher the compression, the more explosion. The higher the compression, the more finicky an engine becomes. The higher the compression, the better quality fuel you need to use to make your engine run smoothly.

A turbocharger lets you cheat on compression. Instead of crushing the fuel air mixture in to a small space, you force more air and fuel in to the cylinder when it is at maximum volume. This gives you the efficiency of high compression with the fewer issues of the lower compression engines.

Exhaust exits the cylinder and travels out the tail pipe. A turbocharger uses some of those hot expanding gasses to crank a fan that forces more air in to the engine than would normally happen without a turbo. In a normally aspirated engine you have about 1 atmosphere of pressure shoving air in to the engine. No matter how big you make the intake, you still only have that amount of pressure to work with. A turbocharger might double or even triple the amount of pressure shoving air in the engine.

The difference between a turbocharger and a supercharger is the turbocharger uses exhaust gasses to turn the turbine. A supercharger uses a belt driven straight off the engine, like the alternator. Super chargers have an advantage of instant power. Turbo charger have the advantage of recycling the lost exhaust energy. There have been vehicles that use two turbochargers or even a supercharger and a turbocharger to solve the issue of turbo lag without loosing performance.

In some cases you can put a turbocharger on a vehicle that did not come with one from the factory without a bunch of modifications. I've heard of this being done on trucks and Suburban vehicles. As long as the turbo does not push engines limits the conversion should work. Typically, this is a low boost turbo. In one case I read that an older Suburban went from 13 MPG to 17 MPG and from 20 sec 0 to 60 to 12 sec 0 to 60. Not shabby. It is important to note this was a pre-fuel injection vehicle.

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Title	Why are turbochargers more efficient?
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