i coulda swore i seen a pic of a mustang that only had one header going to the single turbo..is that possible? what would happen if ya did? sorry newbie!

 

Possible, yes? Easy, no. Likely? even less so. Varying the efficiency between banks like that is not a good idea. He probably had a crossover pipe tucked in well so it didn't show up in the pics.

 

SAAB made a V6 Turbo that used exhaust from 3 cylinders.

 

sweet pics....so much for that idea lol

 

My goodness I wonder what it's like to tune that thing! Definitely something I wouldn't have expected to see.

 

i agree, take a second look for a crossover pipe somewhere in there

 

MOST single turbo cars will have a crossover pipe tucked neatly around the bottom of the motor between the harmonic balancer and oil pan.

It really does appear that saab has figured out a way to turbo like that?!
It's hard enough to tune a conventional single turbo set-up!

 

I’ve always wondered if Saab used different cams bank to bank and possibly programming that compensated bank to bank for the different exhaust back pressure/breathing.

I’ve never been able to find anyone that knows about those things besides the fact that they existed.

 

^^^

Exactly.

Theirs definately alot of pissing around to try and tune something set up like that!

Probably has different fuel maps for each bank and a different cam, like you said...

 

Well, that saab design could only produce 3-4 psi (.25 BAR) of boost pressure because the turbine could not spin fast enough to support the whole motor's airflow requirement with only the exhaust from half the cylinders.

 

That’s not entirely true, there is enough energy in half the exhaust, you just have to run a smaller, more restrictive turbine to get it.

I suspect the whole thing was a question of packaging and just trying to make things a little better. As far as I know it was only used for a couple of years so I’m guessing it proved to be too big of a pain in the butt or cost too much for the improvement.

 

In terms of the half-bank SAAB turbo. I would guess that a cutting edge aerospace engineering house would try something like that in the commercial world. As 83 Crossfire TA said, it didn't last long. Sometimes when a bunch of money is dumped into a design it gets pushed out the door even though it isn't that great.

 

Engineers can be funny that way… they can engineer a solution that causes more problems then it fixes and since they’re on a roll it makes more sense to them to engineer solutions to those problems rather then fix the original one. I kind of suspect that’s how that setup evolved.

Doesn’t matter since Saab is now corporate GM, those drivetrains were replaced with the Ecotech and are now ruled by the been counters rather then engineers (not that I have a problem with the engineering behind the ecotech setup, but how many cars can you baseon one drivetrain architecture to save money?).