The Future of Boost Control: Electronic Wastegates

foreign okay today we're in the Moto IQ garage and we're going to talk about something that a lot of you have been requesting in your comments electronic boost control an electronic wastegate and I don't know a whole lot about them so I got the country's leading expert Marty from turbosmart to help me talk about these you know like there's some advantages to the electronic wastegate and uh you know some of it is obviously more accurate boost control right Marty that would be correct it literally comes down to the control and the fact that we are directly controlling the wastegate with an electronic circuitry and software the only limitation is really your your imagination really with pneumatics the boost control is kind of a byproduct of doing a few various things and overcoming a spring and fighting Drive pressure where the electronic wastegate doesn't have those same type of a limitation so it just opens up a lot more opportunities really so in the traditional wastegate you're running a boost pressure to fight against the spring to open and close the wastegate and the Boost is modulated by a three-point pneumatic solenoid valve typically yeah and uh you know that's your control Loop so there's a lot more like hysteresis going on right correct now if you don't know hysteresis is sort of like engineering talk for lag so it's system lag but uh so they have the leg plus um you're overcoming the uh the pressure of the spring and you don't have precise control and the electronic wastegate uh actually allows us to be controlled directly right correct so in pneumatics as you said you know you're fighting the spring and you're you're putting air to the bottom chamber here to move the valve but you're also having to take into account the drive pressure the exhaust pressure acting on the face of this valve and the larger the wastegate is the more those forces you know impact the control so you have all of these things that you're fighting and controlling that are you know it's just physics right and you know it works you know every we're not getting rid of these wastegates um they work fantastic and you know there's a lot of great uh companies out there that can control these just fine however these physical limitations do rear their head in you know the top levels of Motorsports like you said Pikes Peak that's affected by altitude or diesel drag racing which have extremely high drive pressures or circuit racing um Pro Modified drag racing more of your higher end where things are pushed to the limit to where these limitations of the spring of your control strategy I mean as you know a three-part Mac valve you'll get two to three times base spring pressure that's your window if you use a four port you might get to four times but with electronic wastegates we can literally go from virtually no boost gate wide open to as much boost as your turbo system is capable of making simply in the software you don't have to change the spring you don't have to do anything mechanically to it it's just what your target pressure is and to add more boost control window like a lot of the drag racers in particular in the mile Racers those kind of guys and tractor pullers are running like uh Co modulated CO2 control right to get more pressure yeah to overcome those mechanical forces so you have this chamber and you put CO2 to get even more than you can get with the spring but even with that there is limitations you know the pulsation of the exhaust against the valve especially when you're staging the car or at the top end of the track will cause the valve to bounce and creep a bit and we know this because we put data logging on these so we can see what the the valve is actually doing and if you take a Pneumatic wastegate any any wastegate of the spring you can overcome the force of that spring with your fingers I think a lot of people don't realize how much back pressure a turbo can create two to three to one versus manifold pressure it's it's significant you know Springs are typically rated on an Ideal one-to-one so manifold pressure and exhaust pressure are roughly the same from an efficiency standpoint that works good too but in the real world typically if you want a good spooling system you know the exhaust pressure will be higher than the manifold pressure quite a bit by quite a bit we see two to three times fairly regularly one of the things with electronic wastegates and our patented zero backdrive gear train is those forces acting on the valve cannot move the valve you cannot push this valve and make it open Period the unit only consumes current when it's commanding the valve to move if it's parked and everything's happy there is no energy being used at all the valve is stationary I mean one of the things is that you know I know about the pressure on the valve and I said Man Marty that must be a hell of a stepper motor in there it must take 40 amps to control it to overcome overcome the back pressure but with the turbosmart due to get around that without causing massive power drain and all that well without showing everything that we've done is there's a very sophisticated gearbox and gear reduction system going on here so there isn't a solenoid there isn't a stepper motor that's directly pushing this valve up and down there's a gear train in here and there's a lot of force compounding happening to get that valve to move to its position so this is how we're able to take the valve from wide open and to push it close against up to 200 pounds of back pressure um virtually seamlessly and so the gear train really is the magic and obviously are also our our sensor board there's a few things going on in here too so part of the control strategy has to understand the feedback where is the valve right now compared to where I want it so we actually have two different types of position sensors in here we have a zero to five volt and we also have a pwm m-tron particularly uses the pwm signal out here it has a much higher resolution but getting that feedback where is my valve versus commanded is very important in your overall control strategy the other important thing to know about the control and why these are good at what they do is with pneumatics again your boost control is a byproduct of a lot of things happening your control strategy with electronic wastegates is I'm targeting this manifold pressure and the gate is constantly moving around chasing that manifold pressure that is it so a perfect example I just saw this a few weeks ago it's happened before but it came up again um drag racing guy he had a cracked collector on his Turbo System so what does that do to the Boost right you start losing your drive pressure the gate started shutting to compensate and make it work harder like it's chasing the manifold pressure with pneumatics you're typically not you're sending a duty cycle to a solenoid and it's doing this to overcome the spring and it's chasing it to a certain extent but not as directly as your control strategy with electronic gait I mean we've had that happen plenty of time sure like in in racing like the manifold cracks or uh you get some kind of exhaust leak and the car just takes a dump because the gate's doing what it is supposed to do but it's not reacting in real time like and this little like Electronics can help you get to the Finish Line maybe it'll try more than anything else anyway we'll try again we make hard parts and we we do our best to make the best product in the world but it's only as good as the software and the guy tuning the car really and with electronics you're even more dependent on that so it does take the proper software the proper control strategy you know and the right tuner to really get the most out of them so we're seeing um uh it won't blow open or do anything that's a Pneumatic wastegate will do like the like the bad things uh it reacts quicker and uh I think the other thing is the amount of control you have because uh you know I'm involved quite a bit in with Pike's Peak racing and you know we start at about 7 000 feet and we end up at 14 000 feet so boost control is always an issue yeah and if we're trying to maintain boost control like as we get to the higher altitudes we really have to look at over speeding the turbo and causing a failure or running the turbo way off its efficiency Island so you're pumping and uh you know bacon hot gas into the engine and with this uh you could have your uh altitude compensation too and and and uh also look at uh shaft speed you know like most turbos nowadays have Provisions for uh uh shaft RPM and you can use that as feedback to control the wastegate like try to maintain this boost level when you're not exceeding that shaft speed and because again like I said before the the limits is is only dictated by your imagination your ability to write your control strategy how about this find exactly where the peak efficiency in the map of the turbo is and that shaft speed and that's my map I'm targeting whatever boost it makes it makes I don't care this is where I want the turbo to run and that's what it will do and you can Center it right in the peak efficiency island of the turbo if you want it sure absolutely and obviously incorporate safeties too but I mean these are the things that it opens up the opportunities now I think some of the questions like some of our viewers might have is all with all this electronic cool stuff in there uh you know wastegates get really hot and I was looking at the specs and the specs seem about equivalent to what a Pneumatic wastegate can take as far as high temperatures that that would be correct but what have you done uh like are these susceptible to temperature at all and what have you done to engineer around that so I can tell you that the electronic wastegates overall temperature limitation is higher than a diaphragm wastegates is and it's all about the actuator right the valve can handle anything but it's about the actuator well we don't have a diaphragm we don't have Springs that can lose tension we don't have anything else that's affected by heat in here in addition the electronic wastegates are effectively the same valve and bowl and components in the base product so you know our thermal insulating and the things that we do to help protect the actuator and diaphragm Gates also exist here but in this other piece of ceramic it's yeah oh yeah oh okay that's secret though we have so the believe it or not the the biggest area for heat transfer from the bowl or the valve into the actuator is actually the valve guide so how can we isolate the valve guide from the actuator when they have to be contained as one piece well we use various things such as Composite Materials the white thing the white things and the heat dams and these other things which stop the thermal transfer about as good as you can get and we're always trying to you know increase that but we have the highest in the industry and we're always trying to prove and that goes a long way that's a actually a pretty important innovation I think I've never seen anything like that I don't to my knowledge no one else has done that so we have that in our electronic wastegate so we have the same type of thermal isolation as our pneumatics but in addition we also added water cooling so the motor actually has and you can't see it because it's machine in there a water jacket around it so when you talk about what are the things that temperature can impact a lot of the first thing comes to mind it would be the the wiring or the circuit board or the solder melting it that's actually not the case the real impact of heat on electronic wastegates is actually the magnets in the motor over a certain temperature the magnets start becoming less effective yeah they did not know that yeah well you know we've learned a lot over the years so that's really what we want to do is we want to keep the temperature within a certain range to maximize the efficiency of the motor and keep it humming along so we have an onboard thermal temp sensor here and so you can program in certain safeties into your strategy where if a temperature gets over a certain amount you can open the valve and kind of cool things down a bit but the water jacket itself pretty much handles everything so in like our Bonneville car for instance we have the problem with burning up the diaphragm and um and losing the tension in the Springs from the heat but uh this actually has nothing like that that's susceptible and the one susceptible part you can water cool if you want it's water jacketed correct and uh so it can actually take more heat than the regular waste it absolutely can and I can tell you so for example the KTM GT2 endurance racing cars the Expos all run this gate actually the 50 millimeter wastegate in endurance racing so you can imagine High Arrow endurance is going to beat things up as as much as anything would and they're running this with a motec control system I know like a couple years ago when you told me that you're coming out with these I said I don't know man the Heat's going to kill it and and you said don't worry about it and it's good to actually see the guts of these and um and and what's being done to uh protect everything from heat and that it won't be an issue it's important it is important now again we still recommend doing the water coolants it's amazing how many people don't and they work fine but you know we have to over overstate it and be overly cautious to make sure that everything runs the way it should the other thing that um you've just come out with well I guess within the past year that I'm really impressed with is the uh the straight Flow Away Skates um and you're talking about I mean the obvious Advantage is that it's going to flow because the exhaust gas just goes straight through but you're talking about other advantages like uh like linear flow to valve position and things like that right yeah so in my personal opinion it's easy for me to say this but I think this is the best wastegate in the world and and I'll explain why so first of all like you said the linear flow to valve positioning so with any and I'll use this pneumatic because it doesn't have a spring these things flow a lot but you achieve a whole lot of flow at very little lift and then about past 10 millimeter you're not going to gain any it's just flowing a ton so your control window is very very narrow right because it flows so much as soon as it cracks off the seat with this style the flow is near linear to position so we can get the Flow by the way this flows I believe 10 percent more than this the big 60. right so this flows roughly 10 percent more why well the air doesn't have to turn 90 degrees and the Butterfly doesn't interrupt the Airstream as much as this big valve does but you get the flow of a very large weight skate but the control resolution of a very small one because you can just pinch it down to whatever you want I want just a little bit and again it's so it it's so close to linear it's easier to control the other thing that you know is very important as I said earlier we're fighting exhaust Drive pressure back pressure always it's it's affecting everything this style of valve and the shape of it and you'll see it's very contoured it's not just a flat piece of metal because that won't work it's almost like a airplane wing in there it's very much like an airplane wing it's self-balancing so Drive pressure doesn't have an impact on this or nearly as much so we can take this and literally just take this actuator off and put this thing about half open and it'll just sit there because the flow going past it is the same as the flow going the other way so it just balances itself out so it requires far less current to control because it's balanced and again that linearity of flow gives you just such fine resolution it's it's really a game changer oh that's the other thing I almost forgot about remember when you first told me about that like I bet you that takes 40 amps and I go wow that's going to have to be a lot of planning and the car's electrical system but you assured me that was not going to be an issue so how much power do these typically require average between 7 and 12 amps of power so I love that we see in operation now we do have to overstate here's your window and it's all available in our data sheets because again we don't have control over who's using this product and we do have a big presence in diesel drag racing and they run 150 pounds plus manifold pressure so they get up into 200 PSI range of dry pressure with five kits of nitrous so I've got to be able to drive this valve shut against all of that pressure and nitrous so that's what takes the current is when the valve is fully open to shove it close against that we aren't using any current when the valve is parked if everything's happy and the valve is not being commanded to move it's not using any juice right it's just going from one extreme to the other where you would see you know the spike in energy consumption but again the average between 7 and 12 amps on pretty much everything and it hasn't been an issue the worst case your big fuel system and your big electric fan is going to take more power than correct whether these yeah your electric water pump take more juice than this yeah don't don't so don't worry about it I wouldn't sweat it now we do recommend and and most ECU manufacturers recommend an h-bridge driver to isolate the current from the ECU because the outputs on the ECU typically don't like a lot of current um your haltech you know your Nexus system does have much higher outputs whatever but you know an h-bridge box is is we require it really we tell people they need to do it and if your ECU doesn't have it or they don't have native support we have our black box so this is our integrator so this has dual h-bridge drivers in it it's got a can bus as well it does over current protection for the product as well and your ECU and if you have an ECU such as a Holley or something else that doesn't have native support but it does have a pwm output that you're used to using with a you know a three port Mac you can use that control strategy fed into here and it will convert that signal over to the 0 to 12 volt direct drive and run the E Gate so like let's say you have a factory turbo car that can pwm control boost pressure and it's tuned with like an axis port or HP tuners or something like that if you use that would you be able to use these wastegates theoretically yes but we're not quite there and the reason why is because that pwm signal typically isn't as tunable as you'd like as a standalone ECU but stay tuned we might have something for you our goal is to actually have this be able to work with Factory uses as well so I think that in the future is part of the market for sure bill either not though it's shocking how well this has been received and how it's going with you know with at least four major ECU manufacturers have a native support for them and you know the things that we've seen people be able to do with them has just been beyond our wildest expectations so it's been going pretty good so what do you use have native support m-tron and Tron was the first then fuel Tech and then haltech motec obviously can support anything because you write your own firmware so there's a lot of motec applications running e-gates as well and the Holley guys the Holly doesn't have native support but the Holley with the pwm the guys are using the black box so last year's drag week winner quite a few guys running Holly are using the black box and they're doing it seamlessly so it's working very well but those are the big those are the big ECU manufacturers or the most popular that we would think of and they all do we also have Bosch Motorsports just recently so Bosch Motorsports has very high end bespoke ECU controls for our diesels racing diesels and they're using the black box as well okay so the about the only drawback is that your tuner will have to have some learning curve how the like pwm everything right and the the map blue Snaps are going to be probably quite a bit different right typically the your if you're if you have a pwm system you're using a black box it's not any different than what you're used to oh really so you're going to program it exactly the same and this is going to basically translate that signal now if you're using a haltech or a fuel Tech or an m-tron their native support actually it's drop down boxes and they've made it very simple too it's when you want to do something I have an idea how about this well I have a GPS signal and I've mapped the track Sydney Motorsports right and I want to do Boost by track position yeah that would be awesome you can totally do that but you're going to write an advanced table to do that right so that's where you start you know getting more complex but it absolutely can do that or if you wanted to do Target shaft speed so your native Control won't have that as an option so you'll have to go into one of the advanced functions or Advanced tables and program that in but the gut typically the guys that are going this direction know how to do that or their tuner is definitely most guys that are smart enough to tune totally get it but it's very similar to you know programming your fuel injection system and this and that right you you at this area I want this much output at this area I want this much output it's kind of the same thing they operate very similar to a throttle body in its you know swing open close zero to five volt you know feedback so it's not something that no one can't get their head around yeah there's so many things you could do with this like you could hold the turn turbo closed you could have a turbo size for quick response but then you could keep it down a surge by looking at shaft speed over over boost pressure over RPM you have total flexibility and total control of the the Boost which you don't get with pneumatics that is the goal I mean we've done great with pneumatics and everyone does and we're not going away from that and you know it's a great thing but it's just what's next you know people don't go to the track to go the same speed or go slower than the last time or whatever or look what's next what else can I do how can I get another couple of tents out of my laptop or whatever well it'd be really cool if I could do blah well this is our part of the industry where we can help people do that just maximize the turbo efficiency maximize the performance of their Turbo System and and truly put people in full control well I can't wait till we have some some projects where we could actually use this technology yeah probably be one of our Pikes Peak things that's probably the ideal place for it right yeah um and then you brought this along now what's what's this well you had seen it before at seamer and it's it's evolved this is version two but it's surprising how popular this little guy is this is our oil pressure regulator so as many people know that you know turbo smoking can be a problem and is is quite prevalent in our industry and yeah we had the same issue with some of our shop cars I mean we're very similar we've got all kinds of r d cars and Shop cars and we were chasing a problem with a smoking turbo and it the turbo was mounted kind of low and that particular car had very high oil pressure and a lot of cars do right tune the orifice size yeah so you change the restrictor and you put a nitrous pill and you do these things but again that restricts the flow and it does a great job of atomizing the oil but it's not really lowering the pressure any so what can we do so one of our you know we've got some brilliant engineers in our business and I give them all the credit um they started playing around with bypass systems and ways to reduce the oil pressure to that and this all came down to he was researching the bearing system in the turbos it's like well these these bearings are designed for something what is the design criteria how much oil do they really need and the general consensus was around 40 PSI that's all they need a ball bearing system right and so okay what can we do to just get it down to 40 PSI and our guys have come like I said this is version two but this guy does not restrict the flow right so it gives that nice clean flow but it lowers the pressure has an internal bypass system and it lowers the pressure between 40 and 42 PSI to that bearing cartridge at any time so you can be on a full pole and the motor is making 150 psi that turbo is only going to get 40. and it becomes a problem when you lift off the gases got all this pressure and something you lift it off the gas and everything's kind of slowing down and the Turbo is just getting hammered with oil and it's flooding the cartridge and not all turbos have a really great oil retention system so it overflows in the turbine housing you have that off throttle smoke you see it on Dyno runs or on the straightaways or whatever and I know like all you people out there if you've been playing with turbos long enough you've you've run into this before and uh and this helps a lot of them I can't say it's the magic here but it is a pretty good Band-Aid for a lot of systems that aren't ideal or the drain's not ideal so let's just limit the oil pressure to about 40 PSI to that thing and great things seem to come and this is one of our most popular products in the world now and it was just trying to solve a problem that's what we do we're not trying to specifically sell you on these things we're just trying to help our guys go better go faster or solve problems I just told you you had to bring this because I mean I wish this was around a lot longer and would have saved a lot of headache that I've run into over the years yeah and and you know it's economical I mean it's just a great I I just put it on everything and we have some turbo you know aftermarket sellers that just you know suggest them with every turbo sale just to it has stopped so many warranty claims coming in my Turbo smoke or whatever and they can't find anything wrong with the turbo and Ah that's just a little you know get the oil pressure down to about 40 and it seems to fix it up so all your wastegates come with uh all the specifications that'll help your tuner uh set them up and uh about the only disadvantage is that uh these aren't for dummies in particular um you have to be at least a little smart to be able to exploit these to their fullest capability but any tuner that's worth it solved will get it right away I mean I feel yeah they're not for everyone but for the people that are looking to get to that next level or people are looking to do something a bit different you know we have a solution for you again we're not walking away from pneumatic wastegates um they're they're a great product and and we do great with that but our goal is to literally have something for every form of you know Motorsports that has you know forced induction and also help people get to that next level like what else is there that can be done we're always moving forward we don't sit on our we don't we don't make widgets we're we're a group of enthusiasts that are looking to do better ourselves and we want to help people go faster and do better and I love coming in Monday morning hearing all the great stuff people have done with our products and and you're the only uh you're you are currently the only supplier of aftermarket electronically controlled waste Gates right that is correct there's a marine company that makes like an actuator they can retrofit to some Mercury Marine stuff they're like four thousand they're incredibly expensive and not really applicable for this Market we are definitely the only commercial company and um we don't claim to be the inventors of electronic wastegates OES are doing it you know in various ways whatever but we're the only company making them commercially you know commercially available and viable for the Enthusiast Market or you know the Motorsports guy um they're stocked in all four facilities around our around the world um yeah we we do quite well with them we want to make sure people can get a hold of them and to sum it up I would say the biggest advantages are you can get the biggest fattest power and torque curve you can get the most reliability I love your turbo because you can keep it out of over speed and those are the two biggest things um I mean there's all those other advantages we talked about that's what your average guy can experience with these uh base Gates and the other big thing where you say what's the true benefit to Consumer you don't have to touch it you'll never touch it right so on a racing season you know like on Robbie's car whatever you'll go through things and do maintenance you might check the diaphragms or whatever unfortunately we don't have a lot of problems but you'll check those things there's a very seasoned just because right right just to like this is changing everything fresh and about you don't do that with these you you put them on and you don't touch them again right everything's done through the software there's no spring to adjust there's no wear components per se there's literally nothing in here that requires any sort of Maintenance or repair ever so you just go and this week I ran this or I'm running at this track and I want another 30 pounds of boost change my Target and my software I'm not touching the gates or doing anything mechanically to the system well well thank you for coming out here Marty and I'm really glad you came here because uh you know if I had to talk about this that I don't have Hands-On familiar familiarity with if I would have been uh okay this is electronic and it's good but there's a lot going on in them yeah and then you taught me a lot of things about the gearbox and the temperature control things and the power all my concerns have been addressed so I I have total confidence in running one of these now um so I hope you guys like that and now you have a good understanding about the advantages of electronic wastegates um if you have any other questions you can write them in the comments below and uh will the attempt to answer them no I'll answer them I'll watch it too okay you know and uh now it's time for our Moto IQ commercial um you know we have our merge so you can go to our web store that we just opened uh check it out uh you can get their shirts or jackets um hats we also have a whole store of Parts if you buy our parts from us it helps the sponsor us and helps us uh do all these YouTube Things For Your Entertainment um so please check out our store if you want to get your car or engine built by us go to our garage Services link on the Moto IQ website click on that fill the form out we'll get back to you our website has thousands of tech articles you could probably spend the year reading them all so check that out our YouTube channel we're beginning to get a lot of content so you know if you like hardcore car stuff check out the rest of the content on our YouTube channel so thank you for coming out and we'll see you next time and if I can add one thing if you're coming to SEMA you must come by the turbosmart booth we're doing our biggest product launch in the history of the business this year with over 50 new products showing up and you can catch our news and everything at turbosmart.com and the PRI show PRI show for sure we'll see you again next time thanks

Channel: MotoIQ

Views: 53,326

Keywords: motoiq

Id: TnsIW33qalQ

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023