Do Superchargers Work?? - Modular Engine Test - Stormworks 

that would be cool! Im looking to theese days when you'll flight to the moon in stormworks :D

Yea

Yeah that should be cool

And they should add a turbine so it could turn flowing fluid into tourk!

@Sussy ass motherfucka I agree with you so much! Because I love building aircrafts.

Put a neon down the wings and some drip

U can. He just didn’t do it. If u use two impellers side by side matching the torque things so they are the same, u can use the fluid in and feed in exhaust, and fluid out to feed it out. And on the intake one, it’s the same as u would expect. The air in can just have an air filter and the air out can go straight to the manifold. Or at least I hope it works. Otherwise I’ve been throwing them in all my cars and told myself lies that it made it better

I just watched the end of the video… I don’t know honestly. I personally haven’t tested a before and after, but I put them in all my builds now, and now I feel stupid

Same here, was really excited back when turbos first came to the experimental branch and I could pump exhaust through them to create torque. I was disappointed when this was removed, but apparently it was because people were able to make infinite generators with them. I'm really hoping they add this back in, or at least add a different part that accepts fluid and outputs torque but doesn't work the other way around as a pump. This way the torque output could be scaled down to where infinite generators aren't possible. Maybe some day 🤞

Same

i pretty sure they do, i have a engine of the workshop and it has supercharged exast out the back, idk tho i could be wrong

Me too

Best way to do that would probably be to have the engine controlled based off of temp and see what has more power in the engine at say 90 degrees.

Yeha issues with cooling

+1 to cooling being next, its far from intuitive since the restriction of cooling water has so much effect. For now though I find engines work as one large tank of fluid (shared between all cylinders), and cooling manifolds like fluid ports. Try pairing a single radiator with each cooling manifold, and using a pump both into and out of the manifold, as that will maximize the water flow, thus minimize the difference between engine temperature and radiator temperature. Also nuclear reactors, fireboxes and heaters emit heat in a radius around them, so if you place radiators in that distance they will heat up (even if in a different sealed space)... I find for small creations you need to use a thermometer and threshold to limit your heaters to ~20'c, since otherwise your engines (or steam condensers) overheat as cooling system can't be far enough away, and as a bonus your battery will last longer.

Yes, a cooling guide about how it works in game without calling people stupid. In the game it does not work like in real life, and that got me to quit playing Stormworks as none of my creation can be used unless I make them out of radiators.

Well, as someone who has started many engine fires from inadequate cooling, I can surely tell that it is very important. Lol

I think the best way to compare engines is to pick a load and RPS to do testing at. Then use controller to maintain said RPS . You can then estimate engine load by reading air throttle (in my latest tests even at max pressure air throttle was higher than fuel throttle) lower value means more power to spare and compare fuel efficiency by measuring fuel flow, lower flow is better. If you are testing anything keep variables to the minimum, it makes for better end easier to analyze data.

Yep, and where this gets weird is catalytic converters, which cause some restriction to flow, but actually reduce the total amount of fluid. Thus if you put a converter on each exhaust port you can collect several ports together to a single fluid port without meaningfully impacting flow more than if each converter had its own fluid port attached.

@@SheepInACart oh interesting. Also it is Hard to do this all the the engine is in v10 form

Ford Falcon xr6 turbo. Look up high boost ones. 4L inline 6 turbo. Mix them with the ZF6 sequential. They are mint. Thank me later.

Problem is that you will have to drive the compressor somehow, with a supercharger that’s commonly done from the crankshaft and with a turbo from the exhaust pressure (not possible in Stormworks), I guess it’s more inefficient to drive the pump directly (or with a gearbox) from the engine instead of first converting into electricity and than back into rotational power, so this is probably the most realistic for use in a creation

@@kalle5548 Yeah, my suggestion is to just drive it with an electric motor from a battery so we can see the full impact it has on engine performance without requiring engine power to run it. In a practical setup it obviously makes way more sense to just run it off the engine, but I'm just curious.

It would be best if in all cases generation was provided by the engine tested so real life increases can be measured.

@@tymoteuszkazubski2755 For general use, I 100% agree. I'm just curious how much of a drain the pumps are on the engine. Obviously they are producing more than they would without the pumps, so it's a net positive, but.

@@stevepittman3770 I don’t know, haven’t tried myself, but I think you would still go net positive but with slightly less power and efficiency, you would have to test yourself if you want to find out if it’s more efficient to use the electric ones or not, would be interesting to see how it is in Stormworks compared to IRL

Slap an alternator on the belt and you can feel less bad about that.

IRL your right, but as is in game the electrical consumption works out to extremely little power (like only a watt or two off the generator, where 70 was being shown for this large pump config) so this test is pretty much what you get.

Sadly in my testing nothing useful. Pumps in game don't actually seem to raise the air temperature meaningfully, so adding an intercooler doesn't actually help performance, its just another restriction to flow. Its a sound concept in real life though, so was certainly worth a try.

The turbo was a great idea, but the issue is the game doesn't have internally consistent maths as to represent conservation of energy, so having parts that turned pressure back to shaft power created many unintuitive and game breaking issues (indeed even wheels represent a simlar problem, and electric generators had to be radically reduced in efficiency to prevent the direct "generator powers the motor" being an infinite energy system). IMO the easy solution would be to make the turbo a single part with 4 fluid ports (compressor in/out, turbine in/out), but honestly it wouldn't add much in the way of meaningful player choices to the game simply using an electric pump doesn't. Jet engine wise, you can use multiple combusters to get more power (for more fuel), or multiple turbines (in parallel rather than series seems to work best) to increase shaft power, you can scale this out to stupendous amounts (devs admit jets are overpowered, but aren't fixing as it'd break all the existing creations). Aircraft wise, you'll normally go less distance for a given amount of fuel carried by increasing power, as drag goes up rapidly with speed. However in stormworks you often can improve economy by supercharinging then reducing engine RPS till you only make simlar power, at which point if you go further or not is a function of what the supercharger weighs vs the total amount of fuel carried. A large pump weighs 20kg, so if it improves fuel economy 10% to fit one, you'd really want ~250kg of fuel weight (including the tanks ect) before fitting it would work out. That said you don't need a second intake manifold, simply putting a one way valve in parallel with the pump will have the same result when you turn the pump off... although this only saves you the electrical power needed to run it, as the actual efficiency of the engine isn't reduced in stormworks from simply reducing the throttle, assuming the engine size/temperature/rps remains the same, 100% throttle naturally aspirated and whatever % it takes to make the same power supercharged will require the exact same fuel manifold throttle, and flow the same liters of fuel per minute. So all that said, there will be very few instances where its worth adding extra equipment to bypass a supercharger on an aircraft, simply run the engine at max boost all the time, and ideally control the power output via gearing, but otherwise close the throttle a bit. Finally word pedantry, but common use of the word "turbo" is a contraction of "turbo-supercharger", referring to a supercharger driven by a turbine rather than shaft power (alternately turbo-electric being a electrical generator driven by a turbine, as used by many steam ships). "Turbo-charging" is simply adding a turbo to a engine to increase the intake charge air pressure/flow. There isn't a specific word that maps to hybrid setups with both an exhaust driven turbine and engine driven supercharger, with "twin charging" in some parts of the world referring to this setup, but in others used equally for two turbo's on the same motor.

@@SheepInACart dude, why much text

From my testing at present in Stormworks for any given Air/Fuel ratio, engine temperature and RPS modular engines make exactly the same power (and also heat in the engine) per unit of fuel consumed. Given the limited options for continuously variable loads in games, trying to run the engines at the same RPS is going to add a lot of variables that you'd have to explain and demonstrate didn't impact your results, thus while it would give you an accurate percentage power gain to show off, it'd make the example a lot less clear.

@@SheepInACart Thank you for theses informations, I went on and made a test best myself and conclude the same thing

@@SheepInACart I used variable wheel brake as a load. I prefer to do my tests at fixed RPS though.

Yes, Heat engines are more efficient if less energy is converted into heat. If that's what you meant

Explained at the end of the video, impeller only takes torque in, not out.

@@LaserTractor An hack for this is just add your fuel tanks together and feed it as process variable to a PID with P0, I0, D-60 (or -3600 for liters per minute). If you decide to do this withing a micro-controller the "delta" block can also be used instead of a PID, but keep in mind it outputs difference per tick, so you'll then need to divide by 60 to get seconds.

@@SheepInACart Holly shit mate!, Once in a while, when I feel very smart I come up and read YT comments on Stormworks videos and is the perfect humble pie. . . Now I feel dumb af, thanks...lol

The reason it works is that the pump supplies a constant volume of air, otherwise it may fluctuate as the manifold doesn't actually pull any air in. More fuel require more air, if the flow is too low for the proper amount of air it will be too rich and lose performance.

@@Bendigo1 and this means what? Does this work with stock engines?

@@finnbergermann 1 part fuel needs about 2 parts air. If the air manifold doesn't have pressuised airflow, at a certain throttle setting it may only be able to provide 1.9 air for 1 part fuel. If it has a constant flow of pressized air, the manifold always has a surplus of air available to be able to maintain the proper ratio. As far as i know, the prefab engines are made to automatically have the proper ratio so as long as there is enough capacity of air it will run at optimal values. With modular engines the stoichiometry changes with temperature so air/fuel ratios need to change to maintain power and efficiency.

I don’t believe fuel temperature is simulated.

Thanks for that. My next question is, would running fuel through the cooling system work to actually cool the engine? Even if there's no effect on the fuel itself, it's still a fluid, so I feel there should be some kind of effect on the engine itself. Or it's possibly a self-defeating thing, where the temperature of the fuel gets transferred back into the engine. Eh. Something to look into later.

A pump powered by exhaust fumes would be cool

Black part in

I love adding flywheels to my engine builds. On Helicopters, it makes landing without power much safer and on road vehicles, it keeps you from stalling out, so its great on cargo trucks.

@@danieljones8706 I even use flywheel on regular engine by using modular clutch to bypass the flywheel.

@@danieljones8706 A flywheel also helped my boat not stall and die when disengaging the clutch

Fuel leven into delta, delta*60 for l/s multiply that by 60 agin for l/minute and again for l/hour if you want.

Simply adding more intake manifolds (fuel or air) used to increase performance, but this was patched out. In the present version you'll get the exact same power for a given intake pressure with 50 manifolds as you will with one. On the other hand fuel pumps work just as well as air pumps, so your effectively always going to be limited by the air you can squeeze through the motor, not by the fuel side.

Delta of fuel level multiplied by 60.

@@Bendigo1 thx

@@PiFF_GAMES 👍 it helps to round the number so it isn't crazy long.

The only difference between Turbo and Supercharger is that one is connected via belt, so it's rpm are dependant of engine's rpm. Turbos spin freely, some can reach 150k rpm

Turbo uses exhaust to turn pumps which provides air, where as supercharger uses engine power instead.

A turbocharger is powered by the exhaust of the engine while a supercharger is powered by the engine itself. Both force air into the engine, they are just powered by different sources.

@@Tacticaviator7 Ohhh, that makes way more sense lol

No. Only flow and intake capacity

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Хороший оратор. 😉

Try page up

Do you have proper cooling? As you should be able to cool a engine up to around 40 reps

@@MrNJersey The most I did was 3 heat exchangers and 3 radiator electrics, each hooked up to 2 coolant manifolds, with 3 small pumps on the seawater end and 6 on the freshwater side. The engine has 6 3x3 cylinders. This was divided into 3 loops, each covering 2 cylinders with a radiator and a heat exchanger. The system was freshwater-filled from and overhead large tank. It would overheat quickly at it's rev-limit of 20 rps, and the heat would spiral out of control at any value above 6 rps. Even with the supercharger removed things didn't get better, and so I concluded that cooling wa bugged and this task would be impossible.

@@MrNJersey the heat exchangers and radiators were 5x5

Do you have coolant manifold on the crankshaft or on the cylinder? Also do you have a pump to move water, and are alll heads the right direction, there could be so many things wrong, Join my discord and post for help!

@@MrNJersey im in the discord but forgot about it, the manifold is on the cylinder, all other things I have checked and rebuilt many times.

Change the divide from 2 to around 1.05-1.2 and enjoy the extra power.

@@EdyAlbertoMSGT3 thank you I have like 8 or so different engines with weird rev limits and take ages to rev up

They take a ton of force to actually use.

Yes, placing a large electric pump on both intake and exhaust of your steam turbines will increase their flow/power... IMO this should be patched out as it doesn't make much sense (and indeed connecting a pipe between those two pumps will let you produce infinite power without needing any more steam, so is an infinite energy exploit), but as it currently stands its a good way to boost the power to weight/volume/cost of your steam engines. On the other hand there is no point supercharging the firebox, as you can't apply enough useful load to it anyway, and so doing the opposite (restricting intake or exhaust with a variable throttle valve) will let you get as hot as needed produce the same boiler pressure (and thus steam power) with less coal use... fancy way to drive the valve is a PID, but even just a throttle or keypad works fine.

Cooling systems are complicated and not easily understood. But they do work, just not the way everyone expects them to work.

I tried twin and it did not give me much though i could've been doing it wrong

YES IT JUST NO WORK