Lot of us have heard about a turbo charger while most of us use it in conversations to sound cool. All we know is that it does something to the engine that makes it perform better. So what exactly is a turbo charger and how does it work? A turbo charger is basically short for a turbine driven supercharger. In the simplest of terms it’s just a pump that pumps in more air into the engine, instead of the engine sucking in air on its own.

What this does is, help the engine get more air for combustion and improving the efficiency of the engine. Some of us might think (and so did I), does the turbo charger by improving combustion, increase fuel consumption? Well it does, it’s as simple as that. By increasing power we reduce the fuel efficiency. Hence the turbo charger is a peripheral that is used often in sports and high performance cars. It is also used in diesel engines to increase the power of the engines so as to produce higher power to weight ratios. Power to weight ratio can be illustrated with an example:

Let us consider a car that weighs 1000 kilograms and delivers 150 horse power, hence the power to weight ratio is 150 hp/ton. With the help of a turbo charger on a diesel engine it is possible to increase the ratio hence enabling the vehicle to carry higher loads, hence making the turbo charger an essential component in today’s goods vehicles and other large vehicles.

So then, the turbo charger must be a complicated mechanical wonder that is embedded with integrated circuits and controlled by computers to do all that it does. Not exactly, if we could actually consider the working of the turbo charger, we would be amazed at its simplicity. It’s just a couple of turbines which have fins in opposite directions at either ends of a shaft. One end is connected to the exhaust of the engine which turns a turbine, hence the other turbine which is situated at the other end of the shaft is placed before the inlet manifold to bring in more air into the engine. Hence the engine’s exhausts determine its intake. This sometimes leads to a delay in the turbocharger begin its functions. Like all other additions to the engine, the turbo charger too has its fair share of pro’s and con’s. It’s however a choice that one can make depending on the kind of car that one may want.

A lot of us are left divided between the two segments of cars, those that are efficient and those that are powerful. Considering the scenario of cars in India, we would be stupid not to observe that the economic and small sized cars have a better chance of survival and success here than the ones with performance and power. Hence the primary difference between these cars would be the inclusion of the turbo charger and the other cosmetic changes. The turbo charger is an amazing piece of machinery which as an add-on has helped refine, re-engineer and improve the performance of the engine which has in itself not undergone a lot of changes that were not due.

This article was a user contribution which was submitted under ‘Aspire & Become Motoring Journalist’ contest.