Bill Collins wrote:

>><<Yep... and they don't even know what a supercharger is. A supercharger
>>AND a turbo? A turbo IS IS IS a supercharger!>>
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>There's a difference between the common usage (at least in the USA) and the technical terms.
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>As I understand it, a supercharger is anything that pressurizes the air intake to increase the amount of air in the cylinders. A turbo supercharger is one that uses an exhaust driven turbine to do the job.
>
>In common usage supercharger refers to the belt driven kind and turbocharger refers to the exhaust driven kind.
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>Bill
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Bill,

Think you are right. A blower is a blower by any other name.

Supercharger - as was taught to me in the good old days of my aviation
training - was a device used to increase the air density in the intake
manifold so that there could be a correspondimg increase in fuel to
allow greater power within the same cylinder volume.

How it was drive didn't alter it's function, but only further defines
how it derived it's drive power.

I can't relate to automotive vehicles in this - I don't have that
experience - but - in the piston type aircraft engines the radial
engines tended to have  internal, gear-driven centrifugal compressors,
where-as on the smaller flat opposed cylinder engines they went for the
exhaust driven turbines. The exceptions might have been in the really
big compound engines like the Wright (?) or perhaps it was the Pratt &
Whitney (?) 3350 cu. in. disp. that had three exhaust driven
superchargers. This power recovery system was significant for
performance the aircraft that used those engine. No comparison to todays
modern pure jet, fan jet and propjet (turboprop) engines however.
Turbines all, but configured different ways.

Regards,

John Rodgers
88 GL Driver