QUOTE(alpha434 @ Aug 27 2006, 03:43 PM)
It's not just as simple as ineffiency. It's where the ineffiency lies. With a turbo, by the time you're spooled up, there is no longer much of an exhaust restriction. With the supercharger, at the top rpm, everything is shaking loose and it can't find enough air to feed the pump. With natural aspiration, drag. The one thing that you absolutely must do is find a method to make far more power than you're losing. Some early turbo cars used a series of swing valves to redirect ehaust and intake around the turbo when it wasn't spooled. I'm doing an exhuberant n.a. component on my car, but the air will pass through the chassis without stopping at certain speed/rpms. And I haven't thought too much about a supercharger. Maybe a clutch on the drive pulley and a valve to redirect air to a n.a. scoop at 60mph?
I know this is drifting away from the original post, but's always intersting (to me, anyway) to talk/think about this kind of stuff. When I used the term "exhaust restriction" in reference to a turbo, I meant that the turbo is actually extracting energy from the engine, energy that would otherwise show up at the wheels. And this "robbing" of energy does NOT decrease at higher RPMS or when the turbo is already spooled up. Lets say you're spooled up and running at high RPMs. So a whole lot of air is being compressed from atmospheric pressure to some considerably higher pressure; this requires power - quite a bit of power. It's a common misconception that the work of compressing the intake charge is somehow accomplished for free, but that would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
It's beeen a while since I read Corky Bell's book on Tubochargers, but the point he raised about turbo- vs super-charging was that superchargers are inherently more inefficient than turbos in a fundamental, thermodynamic sense. I *think* the point was that since the exhaust gas is expanding and cooling as it passes through the turbine, there is some extra work (P * dV) that can be extracted from the "working fluid" (e.g., exhaust gas); so *some* of the work a turbo extracts is energy that would otherwise have been wasted, but not all of it (not even most of it). A supercharger, OTOH, is driven mechanically, so there is no more energy to "extract".
I'm not suggesting that Turbos are "better", just that for comparable gains in power seen at the wheels, a supercharged engine is gonna burn up more fuel and generate more heat than a supercharged one. And if its sitting in a 914, getting rid of that extra heat is something to think about.