I’ve always hear it when i’m watching about racing cars, i’m a farn of cars but i dont know about naturally aspirated and supercharged engines.
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Naturally aspirated engines are the simplest ones. The engine draws air straight from the atmosphere. It then gets mixed with fuel, compressed and ignited. One of the limiting factor in an engine is how much air it can draw inn. The more air the more fuel and the bigger the explosion. But a naturally aspirated engine can only fill the cylinder. So a 0.5L cylinder can only get 0.5L of atmospheric pressure air each intake stroke.
Boosted engines however fixes this problem. By compressing the air from the atmosphere you can fit more air into the same space. So you might push 1L of air into the 0.5L cylinder. Now you have twice the amount of air, twice the amount of fuel and twice the power, in theory. There are mainly two types of ways to boost the engine. The first is a supercharger. It is driven by the engine, typically through a belt, and compress the intake air. The issue with a supercharger is that it takes power to run it. So you do not get out all the extra power you put into the engine. The second way to boost an engine is with a turbocharger. It is driven by the exhaust and not the engine. So you get a lot more of the added power. The problems with a turbo is that the speed of the exhaust or even the speed of the turbine does not correspond to the speed of the engine. So you get turbo lag and you might max out the turbo speed, etc.
Another important thing about boosted engines is that when you compress air it gets hotter. And hotter air have higher pressure and lower density. So just compressing it does not necessarily increase the density as much which is what you want. So most boosted cars come with an intercooler which cools down the supercharged air making it more dense.
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