Turbo Coating = More Horsepower: Dyno Data DEEP DIVE 

Thanks. I'm surprised so many folks want to watch it. I literally expected about two people to watch these.

lol.

lol - that was a mistake. I just learned to adapt to it. Thanks for watching and commenting!

I'm on it!

Thanks. The coating is something that's done by Line 2 Line coatings. It's not something you can do at home as far as I know. But it is pretty inexpensive.

Lol. I've had them for almost a year and am still getting used to them. They actually have carbon fiber legs (or arms, or whatever they're called). The optometrist and my daughter talked me into them. And over $700 later... ouch.

The charge temperature was higher, but that's attributable to much higher ambient temps (almost 30 degrees higher). You bring up a good, and fairly major, point. If the boost is the same, the charge temps are higher, how is it gaining that much more hp? All I can attribute that to is improved compressor efficiency. I should've made that more clear in the video.

That's true - I mentioned Audi's use when I recorder the video, but I said it poorly so I don't believe it made it into the finished video. I think Audi uses some sort of ceramic coating if I'm not mistaken. Thanks for mentioning it in the comments, though. It certainly helps convince the doubters.

@@AlexLTDLX Yep. It also soaks up some imperfections in the manufacturing process by allowing the blades to create their own perfectly shaped housing. It's really clever!

@@802Garage exactly the idea behind our self-fitting coatings, which we developed 23 years ago as a supplier to a Tier 1 supercharger manufacturer that applies it to their rotors. Our Abradable Powder Coatings are now used to coat pistons, pumps, turbos and more. Each device is able to find it's ideal fit while operating at temperature and under load. It's not exclusive to new parts, so used components can also be coated to achieve "better than new" tolerances.

@@line2linecoatings642 So cool! Thanks for the reply. In the future when I actually have more budget for a project I'll definitely keep you in mind.

Check some of my high power test videos - I go through a lot of these issues in depth in those. Unfortunately, to fit in an actual car, you need to give something up somewhere. I've had the ESCs close to the compressors, but that seemed to cause issues (I blew up 3 ESCs doing that, for various reasons). Now if I was building a race-only vehicle, it would be a small pickup truck, with everything in the bed and an LS engine with the intake flipped so the discharge of the electric superchargers (yes, I'd run a bunch of them) went right through the passenger compartment to the throttle body in a straight shot. The the cables would be very short, weight distribution would be great and it would make well over 1,000 hp. In fact, this is something I'd like to do in the relatively near future.

@@AlexLTDLX I made the suggestion from what I have observed and college courses.but hey if your feeling like going off the farm cool mist atomizers that uses piezo disk make cool micron size droplets this prior to compressor has the mass gain and doesn't erode the wheel .The ratio of methanol to water under 40 percent is safe operation range. Cooling , increase density and additional octane gets that last bit of hp.

:) Thx - the way things are going, I'm going to need it.

Congratulations! You win the award for looking deeper into the (data) abyss than I have. To answer your question - I dunno, let me check. Ok, just checked. It's almost impossible to tell, I even shut off graph smoothing. If there is a correlation, it's less than a horsepower. With the Eaton that was on this car some years back, you could see the rotors pulsing air into the engine in the data (similar to what I believe you're driving at). It's a good question, Nietzsche would be proud. Thanks!

@@AlexLTDLX Rotational momentum will low pass filter cycle variations. Do you have higher bandwidth MAP data? At 3000 RPM that's 200 combustion cycles per second for the engine and about 10ms for each induction stroke. Maybe 10kHz sampling rate?

If I recall, there's some sort of filtering going on in the Megasquirt's MAP signal. In fact, I had issues (a lot of issues, tbh) with the Megasquirt, so I run a small fuel filter (like for a lawn mower) in the line to the map sensor to help smooth out the signal some more - it was a fix the MS people suggested and it's been there ever since. In fact, until I was typing this, I totally forgot about it.

The problem with testing a conventional turbo is all the other variables involved in the driven (turbine) side - with an electric drive, like we did, you eliminate those variables. It would be possible to do a controlled test, but it's beyond the scope of what someone like me can do - you'd need a lot of money and time - best done by an OEM level manufacturer. But OEMs are coating the volutes just like this, so there must be something to it.

There's no good way to directly connect an ammeter - an ammeter works by measuring the voltage drop across a shunt - basically a resistor. At these power levels, that would cause potentially damaging ripple to the ESC. However, there are 93 videos in the electric supercharger playlist - a lot of heavy load testing, and in some cases with an inductive ammeter - at least on the "less powerful" setup. That still pulled around 14 kW. This is one of those videos: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Xh20iPZa02I.html I also do a fair amount of heavy load testing of batteries - usually up to 500 amps.

@@AlexLTDLX so you have in fact double-checked those numbers (and triple-checked them, and more, it looks like) and confirmed they're about right. Yikes! I guess that pretty much explains why Detroit never mass produced something like that. Still a great idea, but not as simple and easy as the concept seemed like it might be, at first glance. See, I'm not a racer and a turbo that requires a bunch of additional batteries in my daily driver's cargo space isn't an appealing option for me. I'll check your forum and see if other people have done what I have in mind, which is just about another 25% output without a lot of fuss.

Oh, a mere 1hp is 746 Watts so I guess 36kW is "only" about 48.25hp, which I guess is the right ballpark for parasitic losses to be as noticeable as they are, when the compressor gets its power from exhaust or a pulley off the engine. It is indeed a lot for a battery, but not more than the application "should" require in order to work properly.

I believe it would. In fact I seem to recall reading somewhere that Audi uses ceramic abradable coatings in exactly the same place.

@@AlexLTDLX no wonder this car is so damn fast ;) love the deep dive!

Unfortunately, the AC on the LTD is long gone. I don't even think I could get refrigerant for it anymore (or convert it to anything that would work - the car will be 40 years old next year). But injecting methanol into the volute (next video coming up) not only cooled the charge, but also made the compressor much more efficient. I do think the system on the Demon was neat. When I ran a Whipple I used an A/W setup and that thing would melt 10-15 lbs of ice per pass (!).

Or just an intercooler

@@kaiarneberg9203 He really doesn't make much boost, not enough to justify an intercooler and the added piping and weight. The meth is very efficient at sucking heat out of the charge, as you will see in the next video.

@@AlexLTDLX You might not be able to put the original AC back on, but you went electric turbo.. You could also go electric AC 😅 Thought I'd throw the idea out there.. Freezing IAT is really interesting to me, but I love the fact that you're looking for efficiency instead of just throwing boost at it.

I'm waiting for electric AC to become feasible, lol. I will say that the Whipple setup would melt 10-15 lbs of ice in a single pass. It had a 3 gallon water tank and ran a 2,000 gph bilge pump through 1" lines. The intercooler core was made from 140' of 1/4 copper tube. That thing was a beast. What I'm driving at is you'd have to get a lot of mass cold to last an entire dragstrip pass, and then you'd have to run the car (generating heat) to cool it off again. I do appreciate the thought - now you've got me thinking about that again. But we're not really making enough boost yet, like Mike says. Just for grins, check out this old video - you can hear the ice knocking around in the tank before the run (the tank was my center console for a while, so it's right under the camera in this video): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DwFndZa0SSU.html You can hear how there's much less ice left in the tank after the pass. The little LCD display that goes flying is the water temp in F. The intercooler core was something I made myself - I was rather proud of that thing. You can see it here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oXeUxONLO9I.html

It peaks at just under 50 hp (746 watts = 1 hp). The motor is rated for 53 hp. I'm still blown away at how small and powerful that thing is.

​@AlexLTDLX This is a big advantage of your electric setup. Typical supechargers will take the same, or more, power to drive but it's taken off the crankshaft. That's why your NA to boost delta is so big compared to typical blower cars. Very nice!!!

Improving adiabatic efficiency. Basically, it makes the compressor more efficient. Now whether that's because it's shifting the compressor map in a favorable direction, expanding the compressor map or just increasing the percentage of efficiency islands, we don't have enough data to determine that yet. Whatever it is, it results in a 5-6% improvement in compressor performance; at least in this application.

@@AlexLTDLX So at the same motor speed and engine RPM you're measuring higher manifold pressure?

No. As I said in the video, the boost is almost identical. But as we all (should) know, boost isn't boost. 7 psi from the Eaton M112 I used to run made less power than 7 psi from the Whipple I used to run, even though the Whipple took more drive power. Same thing happens with turbos. 7 psi from 1 turbo doesn't necessarily make the same power as 7 psi from a larger turbo. That's why compressor maps exist, along with efficiency islands. With centrifugal compressors, sizing (and therefore efficiency in a particular application) is important - crucial, I would say. However in this case, the physical aspect (much tighter clearances between the impeller and volute) are obvious; I'm sure there's something favorable happening along the impeller blade tops where the gap is now cut down to almost nil - but I don't have the resources to study that, unfortunately. Maybe more subscribers and views might allow me to drop the kind of coin it would take to find out. One thing's for sure - the variables are far greater than simply, "you must have made more boost or less heat (in the charge, anyway)." The existence of surge and choke phenomena tell us that for a start.

@@sumguysr Put extremely simply: The coating reduces the distance between the blades and the wall. This decreases pumping losses because less air is escaping through the gaps rather than being pushed where you want it. This increases efficiency. More air moved per wheel rotation with less work wasted on moving air where you don't want it.

Much more concisely put, 802.

Yeah, it's nuts. I'm assuming that's a typo - it's almost 50 hp. That motor is actually rated for 53 hp. I was changing the plugs out last night and I looked at the LMT motor and it struck me just how small and powerful that thing is.

@@AlexLTDLX I wish!! More like a reminder to not attempt math in my head before 4 cups of caffeine have entered my veins in the morning 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ sorry, thanks for the correction. And yes that's still nuts but I was in 🤯🤯🤯 territory

Lol. It's all good. I've made much bigger mistakes - you just moved the decimal point over a couple of places. I wish my bank would do that...

@@AlexLTDLX oh sheesh, I didn't realize I put 5 *thousand* until now d'oh 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂ bank errors are nice when you're not a stockholder 😂

I used to pronounce it that way until someone corrected me. Me being me, I looked it up. And it's pronounced vuh-loot: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/volute

@@AlexLTDLX oxford disagrees. I do however agree Merriam's pronunciation is different. I have worked in industrial environments a long time and there is a hard Y from everyone I learned and worked with. Love the vid BTW. I was kinda trolling. Good luck and God bless, sir!

It's all good. Like I said, I used to pronounce it the other way until I was corrected. I've heard Australians and Brits pronounce it with a -ute. I've also pronounced centrifugal as sentrif yoo gull before too. I used to pronounce electricity weird too. But hey, technically English isn't my first language.

I didn't know who that was. I looked him up - seems like a creep. I'm not sure how to take that. I do get a lot of, "You sound like Tony Stark" - I'm down with that. This guy, not so much... though I can see why he'd be looking for a new career.