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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Using "turbocharged" as a metaphor for something being made faster seems reasonable enough to me. Not all engines have turbochargers, installing one makes it perform better by improving combustion, profit? Of course I'm not a car person so my understanding of an ICE is pretty surface level, but it seems like a decent metaphor.

I'm not sure most people knew what a turbocharger was to begin with.

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> Not all engines have turbochargers, installing one makes it perform better by improving combustion, profit?

There are many ways you can make an engine faster. To me the choice of "turbocharger" implies some parallel to the turbochargers actual function, extracting energy from a waste product to process input material at a higher rate.

> The scientists found that birds experiencing the “migration” condition had more mitochondria, and that those mitochondria had a greater capacity to make energy (opens a new tab), compared to those in the “nonmigratory” birds. This suggested that during migration, the birds’ mitochondria are “turbocharged,” Coulson said.

So this isn't too terrible. It's a bit more like overclocking than turbocharging.

A typical ICE turbocharger is a recycler - the exhaust gases are used to spin the turbo which in turn forces air/oxygen into the combustion chamber (cylinder) at a faster rate, which can be tuned alongside fuel intake for increased power.

Of course, this tends to be harder on the engine and must be accounted for in engine design. It's not free, and you don't want every engine to be turbo.

And rather than be good for endurance it's really good for bursts of power.

Rocket engines have turbochargers that run before primary combustion. Just to make things more confusing.

Presumably not off exhaust?

In automobiles, if they are powered by something other than exhaust (e.g. electricity) are called "superchargers."

Ah quick web search, I believe they do run off exhaust using "pre-burners" that burn before the burn.

They make their own exhaust in a little combustion chamber and use it to blast fuel into the primary at ridiculous volumes. SpaceX is unique in that none of the pre burn is wasted. It all ends up back in the bell instead of leaving out the side. The soviets invented it but it never made it to production. I think it flew once and exploded.

I’m not sure I would say the exhaust is wasted just because it doesn’t go into the main combustion chamber. The exhaust of the turbo fuel pump on one Saturn V F-1 engine provides more thrust than an F-16 in afterburner.

The Raptor is the first operational Full Flow Staged Combustion rocket engine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full...

Combustion cycles that run the turbopump exhaust into the main combustion chamber are called "staged combustion." The Soviets had staged combustion engines putting payloads in orbit in 1960, and the US flew its first in 1981.

SpaceX's advance was going from oxygen rich (where all of the oxidizer and a fraction of the fuel run through the preburner and turbine, as used in the Soviet/Russian engines) or fuel rich (vice versa, used in the Space Shuttle) to full flow (which has both oxygen- and fuel-rich preburners and all of the propellants flow through one turbine or the other).

The rocket folks call them "turbopumps" rather than "turbochargers," and most of them are powered by a separate combustion apparatus (with non-obvious terminology: if, after going through the turbine, the gas will then end up in the main combustion chamber then it's called a preburner, but if the gas will be discharged outside the main combustion chamber then it's called a gas generator).

There is one type that comes closer to a turbocharger's operation: the "tap-off cycle" runs the turbine on gas drawn from the main combustion chamber rather than using a separate combustor. Tap-off cycle engines aren't common but Blue Origin and Firefly are using them.

“Blown” is often more accurate but it sounds dirty.

but thats the semantic drift right?

imagine if i said something like, "after removing all extraneous weight and safety features, my car has been turbocharged."

kinda nonsensical imo, if someone said this i'd just assume they lacked a thesaurus

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