Something along the lines of the "intake tornado", yet without the restriction. (many say the intake tornados eliminated surge when installed pre turbo)

Since air isn't drawn in through the center of the turbo in a straight line do you all think it may be beneficial to swirl the air pre-turbo through some sort of rifled piping? They make cheap 3" PVC rifled piping should work well. And it's cheap... Might not work as well as some sort of pro-truded blade (stator). Should still get it spinning though.

Thoughts?

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Compressor wheel will bite the incoming air better if it is NOT spinning. You want the turbo to eat as much air as possible and then get rid of it, not waste energy spinning it in circles inside the inlet piping.

 

liquid flows better like that...
ever seen inside a blow through carby fuel galleries , that is speced up properly ??

 

The rifled bore with do NOTHING to change the swirl. That being said, it won't hurt anything either, so if you want to try it there is no harm.

There are a few papers out there on compressor pre-swirl for the purpose of mitigating surge, and it works to some extent for that. However, all of the devices I've read of that actually worked, ALL hurt top-end flow because the vanes needed to get strong swirl, become a restriction at some point.

 

It is hard to get anything for free, conservation of energy. It will take energy to get air swirling which should cause lower pressure into the compressor.

A quote from another forum. He is a member here so hopefully he will join in.

 

That makes no sense to me...Wouldn't the added force needed to "bite" the air and change it's direction require more energy? The lower the resistance/impact on the wheel from the swirling air would allow the turbo to use less energy to change it's direction thus becoming more efficient. Not to mention air flow does not enter at the center of the wheel.

Not saying rifling would do a damn thing don't get me wrong. Just a thought. The purpose of rifling is to spin/stabilize the bullet, I don't see how it would have NO effect on the incoming air.

Seems turbo compressors should also have spinner of some sort to directing air away from the center of the wheel and out to the edges. Much like a turbine inlet. Why not have a bullet type nut holding on the compressor wheel?

like so..
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wantabe, do you want to tell what you found when introducing smoke to the inlet of a turbo on an engine dyno?

 

Apparently electronic cooling fans have started to use rifling in there ducting to improve efficiency. Now I'm not saying the improvement would be noticeable, but I still think there would be a small gain.


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I was looking all over the net for a decent image of that. Usually some sort of fog machine is used. I've seen a nice video of this on a turbine engine. I can't find it anywhere. I think all the long inlets destroy the airflow into the comp. Seems a short ducted bell mouth just like a turbine engine inlet would be most efficient.

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Rifling a pipe would prolly have little to no effect on the air. Vanes would have to be made.

Like quoted above, variable inlet guide vanes are nothing new to aerospace... I just snapped these at work right now so you could see an example of how simple, yet complex these bastards are. The idea is simple, but a speed shop investing in the manufacture of such things is prolly not likely.

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turbos "blow" forward from the centre, and suck from around the edges...
thats about all i will say for now.

 

Rifling doesn't do anything because the features are far too small compared to the effect of the big spinny thingy.

The inlet guide vanes shown above are of such size to really affect the incoming flow.

 

your starting to get into the boundry layer discussions..of air flow.
thats a tough subject to discuss here.

 

I'll listen.. So wouldn't some sort of cone in front of the center flow better? Something like so, but smaller obviously... same idea. could also take discussion over to the adv tech section as well.

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Or even similar to the inlet I posted above.
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The variable vane turbo technology is very similar to that, although not on the intake tract. Some of the new Porsche turbo setups use this as well as the diesels. Had a porsche on the dyno a while back with the variable technology. It monitored turbine speed and would constantly adjust the vanes to keep the turbo at optimum speed. Sounded crazy on the dyno... constantly pulsated.

 

The gas turbine examples you have given are axial flow compressors with large center disks. They obviously need an inlet like that because of the giant flat surface area. On a turbo you'd need nothing more than a large pointed nut like shown above.

 

With air moving away from the wheel at the nut it seems like a bullet nose would encourage airflow away from the wheel. They don't seem very popular on turbos in heads up classes.

 

turbonetics has gone away from the bullet head design.

 

did they ditch the idea because of airflow or because of the extra rotating mass?

 

I did some reading on the inlet cone, and the purpose of it is to slow down the air entering the jet at hypersonic speeds because the engine needs subsonic air entering it.

Therefore I don't think it really applies to a turbo inlet.

 

Re: Random Intake idea... Rifled pipe?

Interesting reading. It's a subject I have been researching for some time and have posted many of my theories...Recently Steve Morris has designed the Pro Volute which is a large bellmouth with counter rotation grooves for the Procharger F series blowers.

He gained over 200hp on a F2 on a 540 BBC with the volute giving 2000hp from a single F2 blower......

Similar results for the F3 but slightly less. It seems the under sized blower applications made to most use. The counter rotation grooves increase the pressure at the blades buy 2.5 psi. I would imagine co rotation grooves would solve surge issues and increase flow.

Ultimately the first person to put an over sized variable inlet guide vane which would allow full flow when open and counter or co rotation swirl will allow small blowers to act big and big blowers to act small when required.

The blower volute was smoothed which also goes to show the turbo and blower manufacturers leave a lot of flow or pressure on the table due to manufacturing RTI and costs.