Turbo oil situation

[Silsport]

Hi guys,

We got our turbo running without a restrictor, in order to tune our EFI. At idle, we are sucking oil out of the turbo bearings and into the compressor housing. Did any of you turbo guys have this sort of problem? I know this is common in draw-through carb (or T-Body) setups.

PS: We are using a Garrett GT12


Thanks
Silsport

[jack]

yes, we have that problem, and yes we have a GT12. we figure its to our advantage though, all that oil in the plenum means variable plenum volume!

seriously though, what we should of done is gotten the bad ass ceramic seals for the turbo, but its a little late for that. on our old car, the team had the same problem, what they did to solve it was run a tube from the crank case vent on the valve cover, into the intake, before the restrictor, but after the butterfly. we haven't tested this idea much on our current car, but if dont come up with anything else, i guess we will do this. oh, and if your concerned about sucking crankcase crap into the intake and hurting power, that old car of ours that did this made alot of power...

the other idea we are considering, is just running less oil to the turbo.

[Silsport]

Hi Jack,

Why before the restrictor? Why not after? I don't think it's against the rules since the air is just circulated within the engine.

Silsport

[Kevin Hall]

It is in the rules.........any EGR, or PCV must dump into the manifold before the restrictor. Prevents guys with leaky valve cover gaskets from sucking extra air into the combustion chamber

[Kirk Feldkamp]

The solution for us was twofold...

1. The oil passage going into the turbo is only a .050 hole. This provides more than enough flow to the bearing. Just fill up one of the fittings on the high pressure side with silver solder and drill it.

2. The Holley Red fuel pumps have metal internals. They don't melt when there is hot oil in them, and they're pretty small and light as well. The only problem is they're kinda tricky to mount in an already designed/fabricated engine bay. Then again, awkward mounting is better than remaking the header!

How low is the turbo mounted relative to the engine? The drain line for the turbo needs to maintain a downward tilt the whole way back to the engine. Basically, the higher the turbo is mounted, the easier it is to get the oil out of there. Our turbo was mounted so low that it was dead even with the oil level. Doh.

If I remember the pictures from WWU correctly, they aren't going to have ANY problems with getting the oil out of the center housing. Jack, maybe you could post that pic? BTW... did you guys ever get that engine with the turbo running?

-Kirk
UC Berkeley

[wmalaskan]

Sorry that this is a bit off topic, but I didn't know you guys had a team at UC Berkeley, you guys have a website up?

Seth
WM

[Silsport]

We have an electric oil pump to scavenge the oil back to the oil sump.

Silsport

[James Waltman]

Kirk,
We got it running a few weeks ago. We had some problems with the Haltech and ended up buying an ECU from Brian at Performance Electronics. Right now we are working on a new intake manifold. I don't think that we are having trouble draining oil. It's pretty much a straight shot down and I went to great lengths to maintain Garrett's recommendations for oil drain size. Our next step is to follow your advice and limit the inlet size some.

http://dot.etec.wwu.edu/fsae/SharedPictures/Turbo/Turbo%20Headers/DSC04546.JPG

[Travis Garrison]

It might be worth pointing out that the blue oil line running from the turbo down between our intake runners is our oil drain line. Probably already obvious to some...

Travis Garrison
WWU FSAE

[The guru of guru's]

We got garrett to modify our turbos which removed the oil leakage problems.

[The guru of guru's]

James,
We too are looking at using the haltech, could you email me about the problems incurred with it, w
as it due to turbocharging?
Cheers,
Dave.

[jack]

just so everyone else knows, the problem with the haltech was one of the injector drivers failed, it had nothing to do with the turbo.

on another note, this was the same haltech that was used for the V8 engine. no one at the time knew that the haltech was bad, but now that we know it was the haltech, not the engine that was giving trouble, the V8 may someday be resurrected...

[Kirk Feldkamp]

Looking at that picture I just remembered some advice I got when I was placing our O2 sensor... I was told that the sensor will not read correctly if it's under elevated pressure, as it would be on that side of the turbine. Have you guys had any issues resulting from that? I could see how the turbine could mess up some tuning... I have yet to throw the engine on the dyno with the turbo on there. The pistons *should* be here tomorrow or Thursday, so that'll be coming up really soon.

-Kirk
UC Berkeley

[Tim Heinemann]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> .....but now that we know it was the haltech, not the engine that was giving trouble, the V8 may someday be resurrected... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


How about today? I'd love to see that thing in action......;-)



Tim

[jack]

turbowig, we never got any readings from the o2 sensor, because the haltech didnt work, so i dont know if it would of worked or not. our old car, that i mentioned earlier, they put the o2 sensor in the same spot, and it must of worked for them. the PE ECU doesnt have o2 sensor capability, so we no longer need the o2 sensor anyway. we will just use our exhaust gas analyzer instead.

[Robert]

Ghost,
When you sent your turbos to Garrett do you know what they did to it?

[Scott M.]

You will find the solution is to add a carbon faced seal to the compressor side of the turbo. This is especially critical on FSAE engines because of the turbo inlet conditions i.e. restrictor.
I have a IHI turbo on my car with a carbon faced seal. It will still get a small amount of oil in the inlet after hard running.
Hope this helps.

[Kirk Feldkamp]

Yeah. Sorry I missed that website question earlier. The main site is http://fsae.berkeley.edu. We're updating this later this week so look for more pics (with the car running) soon.

The other site is at http://www.me.berkeley.edu/ME102B_S04/ ... then go to previous student projects... FSAE turbo system... and that is the site I slapped together for the turbo.

-Kirk
UC Berkeley

[Dan G]

I've been thinking about a solution to the seal leakage problem common to FSAE engines. All you'd need to do is equalize the pressure across the seal to keep the oil from being pulled into your intake path. So keep the oil return line (or more easily, the crankcase) at equal pressure (vacuum) to the compressor inlet and taa-daa, no more leaks. It seems like this would be as easy as running the crankcase vent T'd into the intake before the restrictor and after the TB, just as jack @ WWU mentioned above. Before or after the restrictor should make no difference in this instance, the pressure drop across the restrictor w/ the throttle closed is next to nothing. No need for badass carbo-ceramic-über seals, the plain old seals should work fine.

Under no situation should the crankcase vent see pressure at the intake location, and it should also suck all the blowby back into the intake, maybe even with positive effects (assuming it doesn't cause a significant bump in intake air temps). This seems to be fairly common on OEM turbocharged engines. Although most are now throttled after the compressor, rather than before it, so the seal leakage isn't an issue.

[Kirk Feldkamp]

There are even easier ways... you're on the right track.

-Kirk

[drivetrainUW-Platt]

I really liked the Briggs but I gota ask, you gona turbo it next year????

[Dan G]

Nothing is in stone at this point. We're EFI'ing the Briggs now (had nasty cutout on left handers with the carb). We may not even use the engine for '06.

The turbo thoughts are just in their infancy. I have some questions as to whether the Briggs could stand up to the punishment of boost. We'd be doing some oil system upgrades if we went down that path.

[Engine Dude]

James Waltman
http://dot.etec.wwu.edu/fsae/
Vehicle Research Institute at
Western Washington University

Hey james, when you said you are making a new intake manifold, what areas are you looking to improve on your old one?

Sam.

[James Waltman]

One of the main reasons was to get rid of the electrical tape that held the plenum to the runners. That was all just a quick setup for the dyno to get things running. We did make another manifold but all of our work went to keeping oil out of the plenum. We ran out of time and took off the turbo before we had a chance to do any real development. This was all before the 2004 Detroit competition.