Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Forced Induction another waist of money or is it?

This isn't anything new. Hell I had this idea when I was in highschool many years ago. I would have patented it, but since I didn't have $8k I couldn't. However despite me not having the money there are to many inefficiencies with it. You need to have an electric motor that can rev to about 72,000RPM to produce any decent boost. Plus a motor like that requires a lot of electricity, where does it come from? You would have to have on helluva charging system to provide that kind of power. So then the question becomes how much power are you robbing from your engine to support that charging system? You would have to run twin alternators similar to cars with extreme audio systems.

The only way I could come up with to make the electric supercharger worth while was to have some sort of regenerative system that would make use of otherwise wasted energy. To do this you would have to have a system similar to what is used on the Prius some type of regenerative braking system. Or I thought you could install one huge ass capacitor that would store enough energy to support short bursts of boost at higher RPM's.

In any of these cases you don't gain a whole lot of boost for a very long period of time.

With all of that said... I do like how he used three starter motors to run the screw. I still don't think you can get away from the high performance charging system it looks like he's running two sets of batteries in that car shown. Although it looks like they have idiot lights installed in the car to show the status of the battery packs, I'm assuming red is bad, yellow is charging and green is good to go.

I think to make a system like this worth while it would have to have the capability of providing continuous boost from start to finish in a race.