Is anyone familiar with the Knight electric supercharger? I saw an article in Turbo magazine that caught my interest. So I decided to check out their website @ 'boosthead.com'.

They take a centrifugal supercharger's compressor section and drive it with electric motors instead of a belt. Instant boost, but of course it draws a lot of amps. So the duty-cycle is limited by battery & alternator performance. They suggest mil-spec batteries and a high output alternator.

But I saw 200 Farad (not microF) transistor-based capacitors when I was researching my stereo gear (Rockford Fosgate) that should help. And batteries are getting better these days. All these new hybrid cars are really pushing development of the electrical systems in cars. I believe I read that the carmakers are soon to standardize on 42VDC electrical systems. All this could make the long-anticipated electric supercharger come to life.

At present, they run the motor at fixed speed, so boost drops as RPMs rise. I thought of using a voltage regulator from an auto alternator to control boost. By varying the voltage fed to the DC electric motor, you vary the speed the blower runs at, and therefore its flowrate. Boost pressure is created when the supercharger is trying to force more air flow into the engine than it can take.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

 

sounds good.. just checked the website out.. still kinda iffy about it though honestly and at 1200 dollars it better do something!

 

seems to work but i dont know how you tune something that you cant use but for 15 seconds every hour or longer.. i mean if you could prep for it with 550 injectors and some kinda fuel management as well...i donno seems to me vortech or comptech is still the way to go although i do fine this another option. i just dont want to be the first to do it seeing they blew the altima in turbo mag up.. i mean its full boost at throttle which is where we need it in the s2k but drops off the higher you get and lets not forget our cars redline at 9k so i dont even know if you would be getting any boost at that time . i dont really know what to think about it... honestly.

 

I'd rather just spray...

 

Weird, I was reading somewhere that the 12v that cars currently use isn't strong enough to create a useable blower, and actually impedes airflow.

Might work on a hybrid that's producing more electrical current.

 

That makes no sense at all. Why take a belt from the crank, feed it into a high powered alternator/battery, then turn a blower with it? Just skip all the inevitable parasitic losses of power and drive the blower off the engine directly.

 

I didn't mean run another alternator. Just use a second voltage regulator (sourced from an automotive alternator) to control voltage to the electric motor, thus changing the speed of the driven blower.

You will, of course, always have one alternator to charge the battery. What I hope is that the improving technology in electrical energy storage and distribution will make hot rodding easier by allowing accessories now driven off the engine to be replaced with electric motor driven ones.

I guess what intrigues me is that by taking accessories out of the mechanically driven fan belt system and driving them with electric motors, you can have the ultimate control of when to turn them on and off. Plus it is much easier to hook up one relay or voltage controller and run a couple wires than it is to rig up a drive belt for a blower. And there is zero maintenance.

Look at cooling fans for instance. First they were all driven by fan belts. Now all the carmakers have moved them to electric motors. That way they can turn them off when they are not needed. Drag racers are using electric water pumps for the same reason. When they are off they have no parasitic drag on the engine. Hell, Honda even removed the power steering pump from the fan belt and replaced it with an electric motor.

Imagine how much easier it would be to work under the hood if there were no fan belts or accessory drives. It has been my experience in industry (offshore oil platforms, gas plants, cogen power plants, etc.) that electric motors are much easier to maintain, troubleshoot, operate, and repair than mechanically-driven ones.

Eventually I can see the entire engine being replaced with an electric motor. I saw a Pro Stock drag bike with a 15HP electric motor driving the rear wheel that ran in the 7's in the quarter mile. It had 350 pounds of batteries and no telling how many Farads worth of capacitors needed to deliver the short-duration burst of amperage needed to turn the motor.

I don't remember all the details, but when the pilot open the throttle (just a rheostat) it pulled I think 2000 amps initially at launch and then tapered off to a couple hundred amps by the end of the 7 second pass.

Now electric motors have nowhere near the sex appeal that an internal combustion engine does. And let's face it, most of us are into hot rodding at least partially because it appeals to our techno-worship of intricate, complicated toys. But the electric motor is brutally simple, rugged, and usable.

Its kind of like the difference between an old Swiss (mechanical) movement watch or a no-name digital watch. The former is pricey, delicate, admired, meticulously maitained and worshipped by fans. The second is gumball-machine cheap - disposable, its so cheap - its an insult to craftsmen everywhere that something so cheap and junky should work at all, much less reliably. But they both keep time.

Me, I've always owned mechanical movement watches and loved to tinker with mechanical stuff. It's more romantic, but there are simpler, although uglier alternatives

 

Here's another for you guys to look at:

E-Ram Electric Supercharger
http://www.electricsupercharger.com/

 

i know im resurrecting some old ones today hahaha. did any one actually do the electric supercharger? how'd it turn out?

 

doesnt work - its a joke! most of them are just boat bilge blower motor