16. Experimental Study of the Engine Performance Enhancement by Using a Micro-turbocharger System

This project deals with an experimental study of a micro-turbocharger test rig for engine performance with and without a turbocharger system. In order to achieve higher performance, bigger engines are needed. With the turbocharger, the performance of the engine can be increased without the need of a bigger engine. This is called a downsize. Therefore, the objective of this research work is to develop a micro-turbocharger test rig using a motorcycle engine for laboratory usage to evaluate the performance of the motorcycle engine with and without turbocharger system. In order to fabricate the test rig, the finite element method (FEM) was chosen as the method to study the stress and displacement of the structure before performing an action for the fabrication. Moreover, in this project, the turbo IHi RHF3 and Lifan 160 cc motorcycle engine was selected according to the required specification. The engine performance such as torque, brake power, mean effective pressure, fuel consumption, specific fuel consumption and brake thermal efficiency was measured. The test data were collected by using a dynamometer controller. All the data of the engine performance were collected, and some calculations were made to obtain the resulting power after installing the turbocharger.