For those contemplating fitting a supercharger as a means of performance enhancement,

whose knowledge of its operation is small, this is how a supercharger works. Put simply,
supercharger is an air pump that forces air into the engine. As the power of an engine is
dependent upon the volume of air that can be fueled and burnt in the cylinders,
supercharging is a vastly superior method of induction than allowing the engine to suck
its fill of air, as even with the most efficient engine it will not suck enough to fill the
cylinders. A supercharger is similar to turbocharger insofar as it acts as an air pump; the
crucial difference being a supercharger is a mechanically driven pump whereas the
turbocharger uses the power of hot exhaust gases to power the pump.

Supercharger vs Turbocharger

Why a supercharger rather than a turbocharger? Turbochargers are

inherently more difficult to control due to the tremendously high
temperatures they generate and the way they produce a dramatic rise in air
pressure, resulting in instantaneous large horsepower increases. Although
this may sound ideal it usually results in uncontrollable wheel spin and loss
of handling to the point of making driving dangerous, forcing the driver to
back off and losing the benefits of all this power, always assuming he's still
on the road. All these problems of a turbocharger can be tamed to a certain
extent but it involves much extra technology and cost. Apart from this
drivability problem the other downside is that this sudden rise in pressure,
means very careful engine management adjustments to set the fueling and
ignition correctly to avoid engine blow ups. Several Saxo turbo's that we
have heard of produced reasonable power but destroyed themselves and the
installer then rebuilt them with lower boost to preserve the engine. This did
cure the reliability but then power was way down. Another example of this
was a turbo conversion on a Ford Fiesta done by a well know company, the
result was only 30% increase in power, in our opinion not worth the bother
or expense. Another downside of turbo's due to the very rapid increase in
power, is the effect on the transmission components, all turbo's wear out
clutches and gearboxes more quickly. These components like gradual torque
increases not sudden violent increases.

There are several types of superchargers, most compress the air with the use
of vanes screws or rotors, these types of units are called positive
displacement supercharger, meaning that they suck in a set volume of air and
compress it into a smaller higher pressure volume. This method means you
have to have a large unit in comparison to the volume it compresses and
because of its size, plus the physical effort of compressing the air, it takes a
lot of power to drive it. This creates several problems, one being that due to
the high power needed to drive them, they need a large heavy-duty drive
train, usually consisting of a wide toothed belt driven off the engine crank
shaft by means of a custom made pulley. The other main problem is the
power it takes to drive. It is not uncommon to take 45 or more horsepower to
drive them even for a relatively small unit. While these two problems can
possibly be accepted these units are only really suitable for vehicles with
large engine compartments due to their physical size, also, due to the
complex engineering needed to build them, they are expensive. Another
downside of a displacement supercharger is that they produce maximum
boost at about 3000 engine rpm and then slowly tail off, this may seem great
to get such high boost quickly. The reality is that it is bad from a driving
situation, especially if you want maximum acceleration from a standing
start. As you know any car will spin its wheels when driven away fast in first
gear, the last thing you want is near max power at 3000 rpm, this just
aggravates the problem, nor do you want power reducing the higher up the
rev range you go, this is just the opposite of what you need. What you need
is the ROTREX type charger that is centrifugal and is basically a gear driven
turbo charger. The benefit of this type of charger is it takes little power to
drive and the pressure builds up gradually from 1000 rpm at a linear rate,
making driving a lot easier and the power more useable