Experimental Investigation of Using Turbochargers for Keeping the Engine Power at High Altitudes

A useful method for keeping the engine power at high altitudes is to use a turbocharger set for increasing the air pressure to the engine inlet manifold at high-flying altitudes which is considered in this paper. To accomplish this task, the initial thermodynamic analysis is performed to obtain the number of turbochargers using commercial and authentic software called GT Power. By running the software for different flight altitudes, the power and torque diagrams of the engine outlet manifold at full load are drawn and analyzed to select the appropriate turbocharger chain. After selecting the appropriate turbochargers by the software, experimental tests were performed on the turbocharger chain. For this purpose, environmental conditions were simulated at four different heights and compared with the software analysis results. This comparison showed that the error between the experimental and software results for the mass flow rate parameter was less than 6% for both LP and HP turbochargers. The results demonstrate that via using a set of the selected turbochargers, there is the capability of maintaining the engine power up to an altitude of about 12 km.