Update: How I built a 500hp electric supercharger and the challenges I had to overcome

The 1UZFE EGR Delete Kit is available for sale here.

dweinhart

Member
Ever since Knight Industries fitted a Paxton Supercharger powered by 3 electric motors and used it to increase a 1993 Dodge Viper R/T torque to 600hp from the stock 400hp, I have been fascinated with the concept. He ended up selling his product for $5500 but went bankrupt trying to develop a working one and never recouped the money he had invested. Then Phantom Supercharger came along and coupled a brushless motor to a small T3 turbo and successfully generated 200whp out of the AE86/BRZ. The designer sold the design to a Finnish (or Swedish) company that designed a more powerful version that was able to produce 350 whp but at a price tag of $3500-$4000 but it was still restricted to smaller displacement engines.Through careful study, reverse engineering, and simple math I have managed to create one that easily outperforms everything on the market for a cost of about $3000 but .....it has some draw backs.
1 -T76 housing or larger (massive turbo means more air and less restriction for your motor when not on boost).
Problem areas: Because of it's size, you need a fairly beefy motor that has enough torque to instantly spool this bad boy up.
2- High torque motor AND High rpm ( to be in the efficiency range of a turbo according to most turbo maps, you need an rpm capability of 70,000 at least)
Problem area: most high rpm motors have low torque and high torque motors are low rpm. To overcome this obstacle, I had to source a 100,000 rpm capable brushless motor that has a burst rating of 7800 watts...and it can be run on 24V
3-Motor controller- To control a motor like this you need a controller that can handle between 300-400 amps. These aren't cheap.
4.Power supply- In order to supply enough juice for this motor/controller combo, you need a MINIMUM of 2 car batteries. (in addition to your normal battery)
Problem area: A standard 90 AMP lead acid battery is about 65 amp hours. That means 2 of these hooked in series at 24V only gives you about 6 minutes of continuous run time before they are drained half way (you don't want to drain more than half way if you want to keep you battery life)
This also means you have to run AA cable from the turbo under your hood to trunk where the batteries are...also not cheap
5. Onboard charging- You need to charge your 24V battery bank with your 12V alternator. You need a buck/step up/boost charger to convert your 12V to 24+V to charge your battery bank.
Problem area: Most buck chargers are only 10-20 AMPs which will take 3-6 hours of driving to charge your batteries. The best option I could find was a 50AMP boost charger that would talk about an hour to charge if the batteries were fully drained. 30 minutes if half way drained....BUT expensive
6. Remote On/Off switch- You can't just leave a battery bank with a constant current draw to your turbo controller on at all times and you need a switch that can handle 300-400Amps. I found a remote option as well as a manual marine switch to do the trick. However, if you go the manual option, you have to run AA cable to the switch inside the cabin (which I did by cutting out the bottom of my center console....this was before I found the remote option).
7. Throttle control-It's one thing to get power to your turbo, it's another to control the rpm for tuning purposes...HINT: 100,000 rpm on a T76 will easily blow the motor on anything but a fully race prepped and tuned 1uzfe with lowered compression and supporting fuel mods.
Problem area-I could find no easily accessible electronics (because I am not an expert in that field) that could be used to do this. After much trial and error, I used the internals from RC transmitter because they could be had with both throttle sensitivity and Max throttle trim adjustments.

The take away? Essentially I have a rechargeable nitrous bottle. I can use it in 10-15 second bursts which means for normal driving I never run out..but for all out racing or drag racing, I have a limited number of uses before it runs out and must be charged. Weight difference? Slightly more than a typical turbo setup because the 2 (or 4 if you want double the run time) batteries weigh more than a turbo manifold and subsequent exhaust routing.

The cost ?About $3000.
The smile? Priceless.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ever since Knight Industries fitted a Paxton Supercharger powered by 3 electric motors and used it to increase a 1993 Dodge Viper R/T torque to 600hp from the stock 400hp, I have been fascinated with the concept. He ended up selling his product for $5500 but went bankrupt trying to develop a working one and never recouped the money he had invested. Then Phantom Supercharger came along and coupled a brushless motor to a small T3 turbo and successfully generated 200whp out of the AE86/BRZ. The designer sold the design to a Finnish (or Swedish) company that designed a more powerful version that was able to produce 350 whp but at a price tag of $3500-$4000 but it was still restricted to smaller displacement engines.Through careful study, reverse engineering, and simple math I have managed to create one that easily outperforms everything on the market for a cost of about $3000 but .....it has some draw backs.
1 -T76 housing or larger (massive turbo means more air and less restriction for your motor when not on boost).
Problem areas: Because of it's size, you need a fairly beefy motor that has enough torque to instantly spool this bad boy up.
2- High torque motor AND High rpm ( to be in the efficiency range of a turbo according to most turbo maps, you need an rpm capability of 70,000 at least)
Problem area: most high rpm motors have low torque and high torque motors are low rpm. To overcome this obstacle, I had to source a 100,000 rpm capable brushless motor that has a burst rating of 7800 watts...and it can be run on 24V
3-Motor controller- To control a motor like this you need a controller that can handle between 300-400 amps. These aren't cheap.
4.Power supply- In order to supply enough juice for this motor/controller combo, you need a MINIMUM of 2 car batteries. (in addition to your normal battery)
Problem area: A standard 90 AMP lead acid battery is about 65 amp hours. That means 2 of these hooked in series at 24V only gives you about 6 minutes of continuous run time before they are drained half way (you don't want to drain more than half way if you want to keep you battery life)
This also means you have to run AA cable from the turbo under your hood to trunk where the batteries are...also not cheap
5. Onboard charging- You need to charge your 24V battery bank with your 12V alternator. You need a buck/step up/boost charger to convert your 12V to 24+V to charge your battery bank.
Problem area: Most buck chargers are only 10-20 AMPs which will take 3-6 hours of driving to charge your batteries. The best option I could find was a 50AMP boost charger that would talk about an hour to charge if the batteries were fully drained. 30 minutes if half way drained....BUT expensive
6. Remote On/Off switch- You can't just leave a battery bank with a constant current draw to your turbo controller on at all times and you need a switch that can handle 300-400Amps. I found a remote option as well as a manual marine switch to do the trick. However, if you go the manual option, you have to run AA cable to the switch inside the cabin (which I did by cutting out the bottom of my center console....this was before I found the remote option).
7. Throttle control-It's one thing to get power to your turbo, it's another to control the rpm for tuning purposes...HINT: 100,000 rpm on a T76 will easily blow the motor on anything but a fully race prepped and tuned 1uzfe with lowered compression and supporting fuel mods.
Problem area-I could find no easily accessible electronics (because I am not an expert in that field) that could be used to do this. After much trial and error, I used the internals from RC transmitter because they could be had with both throttle sensitivity and Max throttle trim adjustments.

The take away? Essentially I have a rechargeable nitrous bottle. I can use it in 10-15 second bursts which means for normal driving I never run out..but for all out racing or drag racing, I have a limited number of uses before it runs out and must be charged. Weight difference? Slightly more than a typical turbo setup because the 2 (or 4 if you want double the run time) batteries weigh more than a turbo manifold and subsequent exhaust routing. The cost ?About $3000. The smile? Priceless.
Its good to see someone experimenting with performance options on the UZ engine. I've watched a few utube vids out there of guys using electric blowers however most don't seem to be that practical...... What ECU are you using to remap fuel and ignition? Show us some real dyno figures, boost pressure etc. B4 and after.
 
I'm not sure I can se the benefit of an electric turbo over a simple turbo set up.

Right now I'm in the middle of adding a T28 to an SR20DE in my son's car. It will cost me around Australian $2,000 and I can get from 150FWHP to around 300 without opening the engine.

For around $5,000 I could buy a built SR20DET (being the factory turbo engine) and have up to 500hp.

Maybe I'm a bit slow? Can someone explain the benefits?
 
The only benefit is a scenario where there are no turbo manifolds available or there is no space for a traditional turbo. On an Sr20 it would be pointless.
 
Its good to see someone experimenting with performance options on the UZ engine. I've watched a few utube vids out there of guys using electric blowers however most don't seem to be that practical...... What ECU are you using to remap fuel and ignition? Show us some real dyno figures, boost pressure etc. B4 and after.
Most guys use cheap ebay plastic knock offs and small blower motors that actual restrict the airflow. If you google Phantom supercharger you can find videos with actual dyno testing and proof of concept that they do work on small displacement engines. I took the concept and supersized it.....larger turbo, faster more powerful motor, more electricity, bigger battery bank. I am using 308 injectors 23209-79095 (drop in)with adjustable rate FMU and Supra TT fuel pump for fueling with a wideband, electronic throttle modulation and vacuum/bleed level on FMU to adjust my AFRs while monitoring via EGTs.ARP studs and MLS installed for protection... I don't have a dyno but here are some videos of the Phantom Supercharger that my own design is based on

Keep in mind that these guys are using a TD04 size turbo and an electric motor with a lower rpm rating and watt rating than my own and can use 1 additional under hood battery because the power requirements are much less than my own set up.
I can't tell you what I dyno at but I can tell you that I have to keep my boost dialed down to 7-8 psi to extend transmission life and there is definitely more available boost. Look at at T76 turbo map.... and you can see just how many CFMs (airflow/boost) can be created at 100,000 rpm on a T76 .

These guys don't need intercooling because of the low boost levels (4.5psi) and lack of heat from exhaust. In my case, intercooling is still required because the boost level is above 5psi.
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure I can se the benefit of an electric turbo over a simple turbo set up.

Right now I'm in the middle of adding a T28 to an SR20DE in my son's car. It will cost me around Australian $2,000 and I can get from 150FWHP to around 300 without opening the engine.

For around $5,000 I could buy a built SR20DET (being the factory turbo engine) and have up to 500hp.

Maybe I'm a bit slow? Can someone explain the benefits?
The benefit is that you have 0 lag and can electronically control your turbo responsiveness and rpm without the usage of wastegates etc. The downside is that, unless you can harvest the exhaust gasses to recharge your batteries the way BMW managed to, you only activate the turbo on demand instead of constantly as you do not have an unlimited supply of energy to draw from. In my case, I was looking to build something with 0 lag that was universal to all vehicles that provided an option for those people that could not fabricate their own manifolds or did not have turbo manifolds available. I also studied the remote/rear mount turbo setups but the failure rate of the external oil pumps used to return the hot oil from the turbo to the engine and the lack of room for routing the piping from the turbo at the back of the car to the intercooler at the front turned me off.
 
Impressive. Did you do this work before Lithium batteries became a practical alternative? (Or are they still not practical for this application?)

Ciao,

JZH
 
They are absolutely more practical from the power standpoint. From a cost standpoint, they are twice as expensive and a bit more difficult to source. Torqueamp actually does use a lithium battery but in my case since I live in Central America, I wanted to use a battery that is easily replaceable. You can definitely use lithium batteries since the brushless motor was originally designed to run off of them, but you would have to use a different charger obviously and it would drive the cost up. You would lose some weight penalty from the lead acid batteries but also lighten your wallet a bit more :) In my case I, just looked for a motor that would be able to use 24V because it made it simpler to find boost converters to run the charger off of the alternator. If you use a 24v lithium, you just need a lithium buck charger which is similar in price to a lead acid charger. If you have the money, lithium is a much better bet because you get twice the run time out of the same battery and longer life. In theory, it pays for itself many times over.
 
They are absolutely more practical from the power standpoint. From a cost standpoint, they are twice as expensive and a bit more difficult to source. Torqueamp actually does use a lithium battery but in my case since I live in Central America, I wanted to use a battery that is easily replaceable. You can definitely use lithium batteries since the brushless motor was originally designed to run off of them, but you would have to use a different charger obviously and it would drive the cost up. You would lose some weight penalty from the lead acid batteries but also lighten your wallet a bit more :) In my case I, just looked for a motor that would be able to use 24V because it made it simpler to find boost converters to run the charger off of the alternator. If you use a 24v lithium, you just need a lithium buck charger which is similar in price to a lead acid charger. If you have the money, lithium is a much better bet because you get twice the run time out of the same battery and longer life. In theory, it pays for itself many times over.
Edit...after doing more research, it appears Torqueamp motors cannot be used more than 2 min continuously because the lithium batteries overheat. Lithium-ion batteries are actually very heat sensitive and must be regulated to prevent overcharging. In a trunk mount setup without good venting and electronics to shut the power supply off at certain temperatures, they can actually catch fire . Tesla fire anyone? They are also more fragile. So I think I will stick with lead acid...or gel
 
6 minutes of boost will take you a long way.

Most on boost use would be for seconds only.

If you were going up a mountain path I could see that extending to minutes. The big issue would the recovery rate as you then be driving with less power than normal due the drag of the alternator trying to charge the battery.

Good on you for having a go.
 
Agree with Zuffen. Good on you for having a go... however I would suggest your engine could expire soon.
I'm wondering how you ever had enough time to tune the engine? Every time I make a tweak to my toy we might spend a couple of hours on the dyno and I run an aftermarket ECU and still refine with auto tune on the road after the dyno session. Its not just a simple matter of monitor AFR's; detination (knock) is also a big concern when pushing boost. Depending on the amount of boost and fuel used, you will need to pull timing out of the standard ign map when under boost. Just for the record, a std 1UZ makes 225Hp. A good one running higher octane fuel, say 98 RON might do 240 (if you're lucky) at the flywheel. Adding 1 atmosphere of boost generally means you double the output (when tuned) which might get you to 450 @ the flywheel.
To claim 400 - 700 with 6 - 7psi doesn't add up. You need to produce dyno print outs to proove your work.
I wish you luck and interested to follow your progress.
Some advice from a skeptic; make sure you carry a tow rope and have a spare engine.
 
I truthfully have no idea the horsepower..just the boost. And these are crank numbers not whp obviously. I have blown up a 2jzgte from not pulling timing and running high boost. Since I am running on stock ecu with upgraded injectors/FMU and vvti HG/arp studs, I doubt my motor will go before my tranny as long as I monitor my EGTs. But I definitely hear you...street tuning is all i have. When tuning with this, the process is to turn the throttle trim all the way and slowly increase till it starts to run a little lean and then adjust the bleeder valve on the FMU to gradually increase the ratio. I am not using an 8:1, 10:1,12:1 disc setup. Mine is an adjustable ratio FMU with a bleeder valve built in. On another note, I am not seeing the high temperatures that you will traditionally see on a turbocharger. I honestly think I could remove the intercooler completely. Check this guy out..
 
Last edited:


Back
Top