That's right, I was at work today, working with an electrical consultant because of some nasty power problems we've been having, and we were down in the Switch-Room, which also houses our buildings backup/emergency generator. As I looked over...What to my wandering eyes did appear, but a turbo:eek4: Just thought I'd share. P.S. The "vault" where the power companies lines come in, and the transformers are to step the power down for your building is quite the scary place.
Thats not to unusual. On my boss's race trailer it has a 4 cylinder turbo diesel generator. The turbo looks tiny. Almost like you could use it on a gokart.
Yup we got two huge 2.2 megawatt generators at work, both of them turbo diesels, two massive turbo on each, pretty fun to run, unfrickinbelieveablely loud, you can't hear another person yelling into your ear in the same room with them running.
I don't know how big ours is, but it powers an 8 story building, and can keep 1kw of power going for our lighting system going. But the turbo is massive!
My last job was at a diesel distributor/service company, and the turbos are just freakin' huge on some of the higher hp engines. Turbos that big have, of course, some pretty serious lag issues. Detroit Diesel (owned by the nice germans at Daimler) are moving a variable nozzle turbo into the market soon. It's the turbo equivalent of putting your thumb on the end of a hose. With the increased air speed, the turbo will spool more quickly. As the turbo comes up to full RPMs, the nozzle gradually opens all the way. Pretty cool stuff going on in the world of soot!
I work at Onan where all those generators are made. The 2+ megawatt units have 4 turbos, one for every 4 cylinders. They produce 3,000 hp. Even natural gas generators have a turbo. Even some 1 liter engines have a turbo. Some of the larger portable saw mills have a 1 liter turbo diesel. Turbos have been on more diesel engines than gasoline for quite awhile.
Its more like if you could adjust the diameter of your uppipe to have high exhaust veocity at low RPMs and better flow at high RPMs. They actually work by allowing some gas to bypass the turbine. I can't quite figure out what the difference between that and a wastegate is. Lag doesn't mean much to a generator that just turns at exactly the same speed all the time. I saw a couple of big gens in the basement of the top terminal of Vail mountain's gondola. I never was in the room while they were running. There are two of them. Cat V-16's, I think. I don't know what the power rating is, but they can run all the restaurants up there plus the gondola and five other chairlifts. All those chairs have gas or diesel powered backup engines complete with gigantic torque converters for when the power fails. The big high-speed quad chairs have two backups. They're pretty damn loud when they're under load. You have to yell to be heard when you're standing right under them.
those vairable whatchamancalit turbos have been around for a while. they face some serious longevity issues IIRC. we had a thread on them a few months back. some where my dad has a massive generator. it was some military prototype only a handfull in the world. its pretty crazy, but it should power a city block when it gets going. i have no clue why we have this or when we would need it. IIRC it requires sometype of large V8 with a gear box.
