Turbocharging: what is it in a car, how it works, pros and cons

Those who follow the latest IT products know about “fast pages” from Google and Yandex: AMP and Turbo pages. They were released more than 2 years ago, but did not make much noise on the market. My name is Konstantin. I am the director of the AlkoDesign web studio. We decided to remind you about these tools and share the results of their implementation.

Mobile traffic has been growing steadily in recent years. Users are increasingly reading news sites and ordering groceries and items from their phones. Mobile and adaptive versions of websites are no longer an attractive bonus, but have become a real necessity.

But not everything is so wonderful. In pursuit of traffic and reduction of failures, we have to look for new solutions. Mobile and adaptive versions do not always save the situation, and sometimes they are completely inconvenient: the adaptive versions turn out to be too “heavy” to download, which is why the download speed on smartphones leaves much to be desired. (Is it necessary to say that visitors, and even search engines, do not like long loading times?)

We at AlkoDesign.ru work with one large information portal. (We'll do without names). One of the tasks set for us was: increasing traffic and reducing the failure rate. Without thinking twice, we decided to use fast pages from Google and Yandex.

In this article, we will share the results of implementing such pages on one of the news portals and briefly describe what fast pages are and what they are used for (for those who are not in the know).
AMP and Turbo Pages
are accelerated mobile page technologies that are developed by independent developers and actively promoted by both search engines. Such pages load even faster than the page on the mobile version of the site.

AMP pages google.ru

The bottom line is that the site uses special tags (with the amp prefix), the number and functionality of which are strictly limited. The developer's task is to assemble a hodgepodge of available schemes that will solve the customer's problem.

Search engines find these special tags and cache information in them. After that, when the user searches for something, the browser in the background loads information from the CDN into a special iframe and, when clicking on the link, opens the already loaded page in a special window.

When using any CMS on the site, for AMP pages you need to make your own separate template to display data in accordance with the requirements for the markup of AMP pages.

Notes[ | ]

1. Erich Schwartzel.
   DreamWorks Animation Earnings: A Good Showing. The Wall Street Journal (31 July 2013). — “DreamWorks' final production budget for “Turbo” was $127 million. A previous version of this article put the budget at $135 million." Retrieved August 31, 2015.
2. Marc Graser.
   Diversification Changes the Way DreamWorks Animation Discussions Earning. Variety (29 October 2013). Retrieved October 29, 2013.
3. "Turbo" (English) on Box Office Mojo
4. Turbo (2013) (English). IMDb. - Release Info. Archived from the original on July 10, 2013.
5. Mack Rawden.
   Dreamworks Animation 2013 Comic Con Panel Live Blog.
   CinemaBlend.com
   (18 July 2013). Retrieved October 1, 2020.
6. D3Publisher is Off to the Races with Fast-Paced Video Game Action in Turbo: Super Stunt Squad (English). Business Wire
   (21 February 2013). — Announce. Archived from the original on July 10, 2013.
7. Turbo (English). iTunes.

Yandex turbo pages

The main difference from AMP is that the content of Turbo pages is taken not from the site pages, but from a special RSS feed.

Their content is stored on Yandex servers. But in order for Yandex to take content from our site, we must write a script that will transfer all the necessary data (text, images, styles, etc.) in a special XML document format. The process is similar to preparing data for Yandex.Products or Yandex.Market.

Honestly, the setup is as simple as possible. If the number of pages is small (10-20), then you can create an RSS feed for Yandex yourself, without involving a programmer. True, in this case it will also be updated manually.

Turbo page loading speed is approximately 15 times faster than normal. And, an additional (but not the last) bonus - if the site goes down, for example, due to infection or a DDoS attack, its Turbo pages will continue to open and the content will continue to be available to users.

Pages with AMP and Turbo are ranked higher than other queries in search due to the fact that they meet the requirements for fast loading.

Cast

Features of AMP and Turbo Pages

The first and most important difference from standard sites is the impossibility of inserting “regular” scripts.
That is, most of the functionality related to dynamic changes (click actions, animation, filtering, modal windows) becomes inaccessible. The solution is to use available components and iframes. The available components make it possible to achieve, albeit not fully, the implementation of the usual tools on the site, but they represent a worthy replacement for it and are optimized for fast loading.

Using AMP and Turbo tags, you can implement a side menu, carousel, form submission, downloadable content, advertising, and more. Each component is associated with its own js library, which must be connected to use it on the site.

Features of Turbo pages

They help increase your reach to your mobile audience—users don’t have to wait long for your site to load, and they jump to your content almost immediately.
The increase in traffic can be significant. The advantages of Turbo pages are that after they are implemented on your website:

• The bounce rate is falling.
  When a user visits your site and, due to poor Internet, cannot open your page for a long time, he may simply not wait for it to load, close it and return to the search results again to find some other, faster site. This increases your bounce rate, and the higher your bounce rate, the worse your ranking in search results.
• Mobile traffic is growing.
  Today, many users already know that sites marked in the search results with a rocket icon load very quickly and therefore are actively clicked on. This gives you an advantage over your competitors and allows you to increase traffic to your site from mobile devices.
• The load on hosting is reduced.
  If the site has fairly high traffic, then this point will also be relevant. Due to the fact that content is downloaded not from your hosting, but from Yandex servers, the load is reduced. At the same time, to create and store Turbo pages, Yandex uses its own content delivery network (CDN), which further speeds up content loading.

Disadvantages of Turbo - limited functionality:

• Feedback forms are not supported, there is no way to order goods or services.
  This can be called the most important disadvantage, because... For a landing page or online store, using turbo pages will be inappropriate, because you still won’t be able to receive applications from them.
• The site is designed according to a predefined, low-flexibility template.
  When you click on a link marked with a “Turbo” icon, your content will appear in a simplified page created by the search engine, and no one will see your unique site design. Therefore, here you will have to choose between high site loading speed and the unique design of your mobile or adaptive version.

AMP Features

• Creation of “light” pages;
• The search engine stores lightweight versions of pages on its servers;
• Yandex offers smartphone owners turbo pages in search or news feed;
• High loading speeds improve user experience and behavioral metrics.

After creating AMP pages, Google moved on. He transferred all sites to a new ranking system - Google Mobile Friendly. Now the ranking of sites depends primarily on the mobile version of the site. Previously, it was possible to create and “polish” a desktop version of the site without making an adaptive or, in extreme cases, a mobile version of the site. Now, when developing a website, special attention should be paid to the adaptive version.

Interesting Facts

• Most of the cars in the cartoon are Chevrolet cars.
• It can be seen that the car in which the Turbo gained speed is the Chevrolet Camaro.
• The cartoon contains a reference to the early work of DreamWorks - in the scene when Angelo reproaches his brother for unsuccessful ideas, monkeys from the cartoon Madagascar can be found in the photo in the newspaper.
• After Theo won the race, his broken shell healed some time later. But snails can only repair their shells if the damage is very minor, and Theo had a significant part of his shell broken, so he would not be able to recover.
• The nitrous oxide, which Theo ingested, exhibits properties that are completely atypical for itself, turning the snail into a kind of cyborg (eyes, headlights and turn signals, various signal lights and sounds of a car engine). It is clear that a means to improve the technical characteristics of engines cannot achieve such metamorphoses.
• After Turbo (Theo) wins the race, Chet says that his brother won the Indy 5000, when in fact he wins the Indy 500
• The film shows that snails see objects located far away. In fact, the snail can distinguish objects at a distance of up to 1 cm.

Data preparation

For AMP pages

All images on the page must be described in a special tag, which makes it difficult for the user to insert images through a text editor.
Also, if you use a carousel or lightbox, you need to insert analogs from the amp components. To implement this functionality, a handler was implemented that, using regular expressions, replaces standard HTML tags with tags used in the amp specification.

Another feature that should primarily affect the text editor, since styles are edited there inline. Elements with attributes like style=“color:…” are not valid, and changing the color or font size will write this property into the code.

For the search engine to understand that there is an AMP version of the page, it must contain a link:

www.site.com/url/to/amp/document.html">

And on the AMP page there is a backlink:

www.site.com/url/to/full/document.html">

CSS styles are written inline, and their size should not exceed 50kb.

For Turbo pages

To connect Turbo pages, it is enough to make small changes to the current export file according to the technical requirements:

• The root element of an RSS file is rss, whose version attribute must be set to 2.0.
• Inside the rss element is a channel element, which includes information about the source and its content.

The following are indicated:

• Information about the source site - information is transmitted in the channel element.
• Message information - data is sent in the item element.
• content for turbo page

You can embed additional elements into turbo pages, such as: page header, links, pictures, videos, Share button, quotes, tables, etc. You can also connect some web analytics systems.

What are the differences between a biturbo and a twin-turbo?

Not just in the name. By the way, the first differences appear from the name. They are in the design of these systems. The prefix "Bi" in English means "double", a set of two elements. In our case - turbochargers.

Twin – twin , translation from English. In our case, absolutely identical turbines are used. Their geometric dimensions and performance are identical. Both in the first case and in the second it is double turbocharging.

Advertising:

According to the principle of work

Only biturbo engines use two turbines of different performance and size . One is designed to work at low engine speeds, and the second at medium and high speeds. At low loads of the power unit, the exhaust gas velocity is low. It will be enough to spin the impeller of a small turbocharger. It reaches nominal performance by forcing air into the cylinders. The power unit gains dynamics and does not become dull when accelerating.

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As the engine speed increases, the speed of the exhaust gases increases. A small turbine cannot provide enough air to the cylinders. The second one comes into play. Through the bypass valve system, the exhaust gases begin to spin the large turbocharger, and the small one is turned off. Its performance is sufficient to provide the necessary power to the engine in this mode.

The twin-turbo system uses two identical turbines . They are used both to increase power and to separate compressed air flows into different cylinders. You can often find it in V-shaped engines, each head has its own turbocharger.

Advertising:

In addition, two smaller turbochargers are used to smooth out the turbo lag. Their lower inertia allows the internal combustion engine to “spin up” from the very bottom. Their cold parts are connected into a single collector. Separately, they have a small productivity, and in parallel - doubled. Such twin-turbo systems are called parallel.

The next variety is the sequential twin turbo. This is when two identical turbo units are connected in series, both along the flow of exhaust gases and cold air. This option is also called a sequential turbo system.

Similar switching schemes can be used in both biturbo and twin-turbo engines. Based on this feature, they are similar, it is impossible to distinguish them.

Practice

We implement AMP on the site

Considering that we are far from new to the IT field, implementing the pages was not difficult.
We created a separate template for the site using the necessary tags from the AMP and Turbo specification. Then we set up automatic page generation.

Immediately after the implementation of fast pages, we launched verification through Google and Yandex validator. After launch, additional errors were discovered that were successfully resolved.

Implementing Turbo pages

To implement Turbo pages on the site, the format specification was studied.
Templates have been defined for generating turbo page titles and specifying additional images. A specialized module for CMS was developed that generates RSS files with data, according to Yandex technical documentation (partner.news.yandex.ru/tech.pdf). Since materials on the site are constantly being added, the RSS feed with turbo pages is also updated by running the update script on CRON. Due to the specifics of the project, it was decided to create several RSS feeds, each for its own type of content. In the module settings, you can specify which sections of the site need to be exported to RSS, and specify additional data for export. The frequency of updates to the RSS feed of turbo pages is set by the frequency of task execution on CRON.

After passing RSS validation by Yandex, Turbo pages were added to indexing.

What else is needed for tuning

Before installing a turbine on a VAZ, you need to decide how much total power you want to squeeze out of the engine. If you want to get more than 200 horses, then you need to find a block from Kalina. It is 2.3 mm higher than the standard one. You can use an engine block from a 10th family car, but this will significantly reduce power.

It is imperative to install the crankshaft from a Lada Kalina car. The diameter of the crank mechanism is 75.6 mm. Be sure to use and carve a notch in them, which will allow you to achieve the required degree of compression. It is recommended to contact a competent specialist to make these recesses, or to purchase ready-made products in tuning stores.

results

Failures

After the introduction of AMP and Turbo pages, behavioral metrics changed.
Website bounce rate for the quarter

overall amounted to
14.2%
. All visitors are taken into account here, including desktop users.

Bounce rate for smartphone owners

, which came to regular pages, amounted to
23.7% for the quarter
.

Bounce Rate for Turbo Page Visitors

for the same period amounted to
6,2 %.

That is, in terms of bounce rate, regular pages lose to turbo pages by more than twice: 23.7% versus 6.2% with Turbo pages and 14.2% overall.

.

Attendance

Since the introduction of AMP and Turbo pages, we have increased traffic to the portal by 2 times
.

Page loading speed

The main advantage is an increase in page loading speed by 3 to 10 times
. It grew instantly due to caching.

And:

• The load on the servers has decreased
• Behavioral factors have increased (AMP does not directly affect positions in organics).

What's new in the sites?

Cross-cutting sections for the top and bottom menus on all pages of the site will save time on page copying and changes.

The shopping cart and order form work on all pages. Even in a catalog of several pages, the user will be able to collect products in one basket and place an order from any section of the site.

Automatic substitution of your organization's data from the Directory. If your organization’s card is in the Directory, data from it can be quickly added to the Turbo website. Name, phone number, email and other contacts will automatically fill in the necessary sections on all pages of the site and will be updated when changes are made in the Directory. If the card is not yet in the Directory, you can easily create it directly in the Direct constructor. We have prepared detailed instructions in Help.

The library of saved sections will allow you to save your templates with content and design options. For example, you can temporarily remove the finished product from the display case and return it later, so as not to reassemble the section with it again.

Transferring pages from folder to folder. To make it more convenient for you to structure your content, we have added functions for moving pages from one folder to another. Folders and sites can also be transferred from folder to folder. For example, you can collect pages that have already been published and linked to advertisements into a separate website. Read details in Help.

Conclusion: we implement it appropriately and wisely

Where you need to convey content to the user as quickly and in a simple form as possible.

In our case, the result of implementation was:

• the refusal rate decreased overall by 2 times;
• attendance doubled;
• download speed increased by 3-10 times

For whom Turbo is not yet suitable:

• Ecommerce, because there is no shopping cart. (currently in development)
• Landing page, because any buttons and forms on pages are not supported

Who is ideal for Turbo pages:

• mass media
• Content projects
• Blogs within websites (for example, an information section in an online store, with news, descriptions of industry news, etc.)

We strongly recommend that owners of news portals, media sites or information blogs connect such pages.
This will allow you to get additional traffic, reduce the number of impressions and increase the number of pages viewed. AMP and Turbo Pages

is an interesting technology that needs to be used wisely. Can be used for a “light” mobile version of the site, or for certain sections that do not require high functionality. And, of course, this is an excellent solution for information sites, blogs, and online magazines.

Video games

A video game based on the film, titled "Turbo: Super Stunt Squad", was released on July 16, 2013. The game was released on the Wii, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms. The Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii U versions were created by Monkey Bar Games, and the 3DS, DS, Wii versions were created by Torus Games. The gameplay allows you to perform various racing stunts while playing as a team of snails to show your skills and overcome all obstacles[3].

Mobile version of the game called "Turbo Racing League"

was released on May 22, 2013 for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The gameplay allows players to compete in races while playing as snails[4].

The principle of operation of turbocharging

Scheme of engine turbocharging
The principle of operation of the turbocharging system is as follows:

• The engine exhaust gases, passing through the turbocharger, spin the turbine wheel.
• The rotation of the turbine wheel is transferred to the compressor wheel, since they are mounted on the same shaft.
• The compressor compresses the air coming from the air intake and sends it to the intercooler.
• In the intercooler, the air is cooled and enters the engine cylinders.

The operating principle of turbocharging is quite simple. The exhaust gases emitted by the engine enter the turbine and cause it to rotate. The turbine, in turn, transmits torque to the compressor, which sucks in air and compresses it. The compressed air is then directed into the engine cylinders. Optionally, an intercooler (intercooler) is added to this circuit.

The meaning of pumping in additional air becomes clear if we recall the principle of operation of an internal combustion engine. The fuel-air mixture burns in its cylinders; this process pushes the piston, which turns the crankshaft. But, for efficient combustion of the mixture, it is important to maintain the correct ratio of fuel and air, so you cannot increase power simply by adding more fuel to the mixture. Along with increasing the amount of fuel, the amount of air must also be increased.

This can be done by increasing the volume of the cylinder so that more air can fit into it. But you can go the other way - increase the density of the air driven into the cylinders. Then you can extract significantly more power from the same unit of engine displacement. A good example is sports cars, where each liter of volume can produce more than 150 hp.

The principle is based on the power of energy possessed by exhaust gases. It drives the turbine wheel. This, in turn, contributes to the rotation of the compressor wheel. The rotor shaft provides assistance in this. The job of a compressor wheel is to compress air. It heats up, and after entering the intercooler it is cooled and supplied to the cylinders.

1 – air filter; 2 – low pressure air supply hose; 3 – boost control valve; 4 – turbocharger; 5 – throttle unit; 6 – air supply hose of cooled charge air; 7 – charge air cooling radiator (intercooler); 8 – air supply hose of hot charge air; 9 – air intake

How intensively the system will work depends on the nature of the operation of the power unit itself. It should be said that there is no rigid connection between the turbocharging and the engine crankshaft. The energy of the exhaust gases increases with the number of engine rotations. The stronger the motor works, the more intensely the energy potential increases. Consequently, the supply of compressed air also increases.

The figure shows the operating principle of one of the main elements of the turbocharging system - the turbocharger.

However, not everything is so simple here. There are a number of factors that limit the use of turbocharging. First of all, such factors include detonation. Its occurrence is simply due to the fact that the gasoline unit simply sharply increases its rotation. Another factor is the significant temperature parameters that the exhaust gases have. This causes significant heating of the turbocharger and the turbocharged engine as a whole.

Cooling system and turbocharging device

The cooling system of turbochargers is necessary to improve the transfer of heat from its mechanisms and parts. The most common options for cooling parts are the oil method and complex cooling with antifreeze and oil. Both types have their advantages, but are not without their disadvantages.

The main element of the turbocharging system is the turbocharger

Structurally, the turbocharging device includes a turbocharger, an intercooler, a device that regulates the boost pressure and other components. However, the first violin in this design is played by the turbocharger. With its help, the pressure in the air intake system increases.

This is what the intercooler looks like

Air masses must be cooled somehow. For this purpose, the design provides an intercooler. By cooling the compressed air coming from the compressor, it helps to increase its density. As a result, the pressure increases. Structurally, it is a radiator, and its type can be either liquid or air.

Photo of the boost regulator (bypass valve)

The system is controlled via a boost regulator. It is nothing more than a bypass valve. Its main purpose is to limit the pressure of exhaust gases. They are not all directed to the turbine wheel: a certain number of them go past it. In this case, the boost pressure becomes optimal. The valve is operated either pneumatically or electrically. The sensor sends signals, resulting in valve activation.

Photo of the throttle body from a Jaguar 4.4 petrol engine

A safety valve is also provided. The throttle valve may close abruptly, causing a sudden rush of air. The job of this valve is to protect against such actions.

Twin parallel Coyote 5.0L V8 turbochargers

In the case of units of sufficiently large power, a system is used that involves two parallel turbochargers.

Read more: Design and principle of operation of the radiator heater, crane fan motor and other elements

If turbines are installed sequentially on a power unit, this ensures increased performance due to the operation of different turbochargers at different engine speeds. The developers do not stand still, but try to move forward. Moreover, instead of two, he installs three or even four sequential turbochargers.