[GeorgeKangas]

The word "turbocharger" was introduced to shorten the phrase "turbine supercharger", whether driven by the crankshaft or by the exhaust. Later, it came to mean "exhaust driven turbine supercharger" pretty much exclusively.

I don't have any dates for these usages.

Edit: that p-47 powertrain is an absolute beast!

[jandrese]

The crazy part is that by modern standards they aren't really developing that much power. Sure this thing puts out 2,100 HP (using 130 octane gas), but it needs a whopping 46 liters of displacement to get that.

A Veyron engine puts out about half the HP using 17% of the displacement on worse gas. You can't even buy 130 octane gas anymore. The Veyron is a notorious fuel hog, but it has nothing on a twin Wasp radial.

[bigiain]

> A Veyron engine puts out about half the HP using 17% of the displacement on worse gas.

Not at 45,000’ altitude it doesn’t.

And that Veyron engine won’t be too happy running at 80+% of its rated power level for more than a few minutes at a time.

[czch]

But the P-47 is on fairly high power the whole time it’s running. Most Veyrons will never use 50% of their rated power.

That being said, modern metallurgy really revolutionized ICEs. Followed by computerized control.

[jabl]

The 130 octane gas you refer to is actually 100/130 lean/rich avgas. Quite similar to the 100LL still used today.

Towards the end of the war the Allies were using 115/145 in fighters for even more oomph.

As for fuel consumption, those WWII piston engines actually were quite efficient, look up BSFC numbers if interested. Fuel load and range were critical issues. It took many decades, energy crises and computer control for car engines to catch up.

[diarrhea]

So when you have such a turbine supercharger driven by the crankshaft, what does the turbine do at all?

[usrusr]

A crankshaft driven charger would haven been called just a supercharger, exactly like we do today. But we don't call turbine driven chargers "turbine supercharger" anymore, we call that a turbocharger.

[Toutouxc]

I don't get the downvotes, you're right.

A crankshaft driven supercharger doesn't need a turbine (a device that extracts power from a fluid), only an impeller (the opposite).

[sk5t]

I think what you’re getting at is that there is no turbine (only an impeller) in the case of crank/belt driven units.