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Toymods Vice President
Location:
Sydney
Registered:
May 2002
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Re: VNT turbos! (links to a great picture site)
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Fri, 27 February 2004 05:28
 
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What I want is one of the new turbos Garret is working on for the 48volt cars. They have a built in "motor" that can generate 5lb of boost from idle and then when the exhaust is enough to spin the turbine it switches over to generate electricity so there is no need to have an alternator. The motor can also be used to control shaft speed for production cars so that there is no need for a wastegate.
We looked at this technology when we toured Garret last year, very informative tour and the guys are super helpful. They are also working on other ways to use the electricity generated by the turbo such as coils in the flywheel to use it as a motor as well during accelleration. All of this looks good for the future of high performance small capacity internal combustion engines.
As far as I know Garret are also working on VNT but the future looks to be the electric assist turbo.
On the same note about the Garret tour they were quite cautionary on the future of turbo factory cars. The reason for this is that it is hard to get cat light off quick enough to pass emissions laws when you have a big hunk of cast iron in the exhaust path that has to get heated up by the exhaust gasses before the cat gets up to temp. So there should be a lot of interesting metalurgy going into new materials for turbine housings in the near future.
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