[hayden55]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

An electric supercharger or turbo would generally not work, unless,
Mercedes has been doing some research...

Instead of a Turbo compressing incoming air, Mercedes equipped their car exhaust with turbo-like turbines; powering a small generator; feeding a battery, that goes straight to an electric motor.

You could even do without the battery, and just install an electric motor to one of the rear wheels, and directly connect it to the generator powered by the exhaust turbine.
It would only be bad if you'd be pressing the brake at the same time as the accelerator.

Anyway, you'd be surpassing 50% engine efficiency like that, or add about 30% of MPG.

If you do install a battery pack, or supercapacitor pack, you could harvest kinetic energy on one wheel (if engineered well).


The simpler solution is use one of those turbo exhaust blades and electric generator, to power an electric supercharger. The exhaust would be making a few HP in most cases.


Just adding a 12V supercharger would probably increase HP by 1% or less, and isn't worth it.

Its a big maybe on the exhaust turbine spinning an electric motor. It is the next low hanging fruit but Physics comes into play. Since (the best) turbines are only 30% efficient and then it has to go to an e motor then to charge a battery you have a very inefficient complex system. F1 has decided its too expensive and failure prone and are voting as a whole to get rid of what they call the "MGU-h" for the next rule set.