How to Increase Engine Power
A poorly functioning engine is not only detrimental to the performance of your car but it can make your driving experience rough. One of the causes of a poorly functioning engine is a lack of power. Interestingly, there are some mods to increase horsepower of your car’s engine.
In this guide, we take a look at what engine power means, how it is generated, simple mods to enhance the performance of the car’s engine parts and how you can build a high performance engine.
How Power Is Generated In Engine?
Let’s begin with understanding what engine power is. Whenever you read about power in the engine, you’ll encounter the term ‘horsepower’. Horsepower refers to the power produced by the car’s engine.
Before proceeding further, let’s understand how fuel energy is converted into power in the engine. In the carburettor, when fuel is mixed with air it forms a flammable mixture. This highly flammable mixture is transmitted into the cylinders via valves, compressed, and then ignited through a spark plug. The expansion of hot gases pushes the piston in a cylinder thus converting the linear movement of the piston into the rotating movement of the crankshaft to generate power.
Ways to Increase Engine Power
Driving with a high performance engine makes your ride more comfortable and prevents your car from the damage. Let’s go through how you can increase your car’s horsepower.
Engine Tuning
Engine tuning refers to altering or modifying the internal combustion engine or Engine Control Unit (ECU) to achieve supreme performance and enhance the engine’s power output, economy, or durability.
Tuning includes a wide assortment of adjustments and modifications ranging from minor adjustment of the carburetor and ignition system to significant overhaul of the engine like supplanting spark plugs, fuel filter, distributor cap and rotor.
ECU tuning does not do any harm to your car’s engine if done correctly. It is, in fact, beneficial in increasing your car’s horsepower and building a high performance engine. It is important to remember, however, that extreme tuning may have an adverse impact on the engine’s longevity.
Install performance camshaft
A camshaft is part of an engine that activates the intake and exhaust valves of the cylinder and controls the opening and closing outlets of the valve. Here’s how a performance camshaft increases the power of a car’s engine: By acting as the power source for the intake and exhaust valves, it sucks air, blends it with fuel, compresses it, and then burns it which ultimately increases the power output.
Increasing compression
Another method to increase the engine power is to increase the compression. The engine compression ratio is the ratio between the volume of the cylinder and combustion chamber in an internal combustion engine at their maximum and minimum values.
The higher the ratio, the more energy an engine can extract from the combustion process due to higher thermal efficiency, and it also allows for the same combustion temperatures to be achieved with much less fuel consumption.
Supercharging and turbocharging are the two common methods used to increase the compression. In supercharging, more air is forced into the engine than usual, causing the fuel to burn faster and the car to produce more power. In turbocharging, on the other hand, an air compressor and a turbine pushes the recycled car exhaust into the engine’s combustion chamber. This forced induction improves fuel efficiency and increases the power of your car’s engine.
One full point of compression adds about 3 to 4 percent power which means that if an engine is putting out 40 hp, adding a full point of compression (from 11 to 12:1) will increase the power to about 41.2 hp.
This ends our guide about the mods to increase horsepower of your car’s engine. Since the engine is an extremely important component of automobiles and any misstep can have an adverse effect on your car, it is advised that only those who are qualified should carry out the above mentioned ways to increase engine power. However, if your car’s engine regularly requires repair and isn’t working smoothly, you can browse through this large collection of used cars for sale in the UAE at reasonable prices.
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