Turbo Blankets or Beanies where introduced for 4 key reasons:
- Reduce under bonnet or hood temperatures to protect fuel lines, hoses and other engine components from heat damage
- Reduce the chance of injury for mechanics working near hot turbochargers
- Improve performance by lowering engine bay temperatures and therefore intake air temperatures
- Increase temperatures of the turbo exhaust housing and therefore accelerate the intake turbine faster, reducing lag and in turn increase boost pressures
Turbo Blankets have no doubt proved themselves to be very popular with turbo car owners, but will a Turbo Blanket really bring on Boost faster?
Luckily for us, graduate research assistant Steffen Bickle at the University of Texas decided to thoroughly investigate this theory.
Click HERE to read his paper.
The short version is, yes, Turbo Blankets or Turbo Beanies definitely do increase exhaust housing temperatures and help to build boost faster.
Steffan Bickle found that …..”With the turbo blanket mounted, the turbocharger shaft speeds exceeded their baseline counterpart for identical engine operating conditions which resulted in increased boost pressures throughout all tested steady state speed-load point”.
He went on to conclude…”The time-to-torque improvement with the PTP Turbo Blanket was significant, especially for the last case, in which we used a simultaneous tip-in of the speed and the load, the time-to-torque improvement was impressive with an instantaneous torque improvement of up to 140 Nm. This led to an acceleration advantage of 250 engine rpm in spite of the fact that the duration was less than 2.5 s for the entire event. The improvement of the turbocharger performance provided this engine performance advantage because the turbocharger spool-up was faster which resulted in a boost pressure advantage of up to 0.3 bar when the PTP Turbo Blanket was mounted”.
I think that we can safely agree that a Turbo Beanie or Turbo Blanket is a very cheap and easy addition to any Turbocharged Car and the benefits are proven.
- Faster spool up of the turbocharger- less lag
- Cooler under bonnet or under hood temperatures
- Potential power gains by reduced engine bay temperatures
- A safer engine bay for mechanics and enthusiasts
Check our the Kool Wrap range of Turbo Blankets or Beanies
