I have a 2000 volvo s40 with a 1.9t I was wondering can put a 19t turbo in the car with a 3 inch downpipe. They say at 27 psi you can get 290 hhp! Is that true?

 

lol..

 

Well, sure. Why not? At least for a minute or two anyway.

The issue is that this is a street/family sedan, designed to have a 170hp engine in it. Engineers always design up, so maybe the car could withstand 200hp reasonably well. But past that you have to look at everything from the pistons to the wheels, and how much stress can each part down the line take? And Volvo was not thinking about the tuning crowd when designing it. Other cars, especially Hondas, take more readily to it... and you can find TONS of performance everything and anything on the net.

Force this engine up to 300hp+ and you will probobly snap the stock crankshaft, heck you might even blow the head right off of the engine.

But, if this is just a fun project car that doesn't need to be reliable AT ALL, just a few moments of glory then by all means ...

 

Well i was hopeing to upgrade all the internals also..... I dont wanna blow it up haha

 

Sure, you can get 300hp out of a 4 cyl engine but as noted there are a lot of design considerations to create durable engine. For starters, think of an engine as a pumping system. Assume that you need to double the airflow in/out of the pistons to double the power, which means you need either higher compression/bigger ports/longer valve durations to get the air in or you need to push the air in with more boost. To go from say 13 PSI to 27 you need a really big turbo (ie a 19T vs the 12T) and you'd need a big cat/downpipe etc (3 inches should be ok) and free flow intake. All the plumbing dealing with the intake air pressure need to be upgraded as well. Now you've stuffed all this air in the pistons you need to deal with extra heat. Big intercooler to start, oil coolers & radiators, piston oil spray jets, run water wetter in the coolant etc. Many blue prints call for lowering compression - either via new pistons/rods or via thicker head gaskets with metal rings to keep all that pressure in place or a water injection system. As noted you'd need to beef up the bottom end - new rods, bolts/caps etc to go with those new pistons and head gasket. Finally you'd need to get a new boost control set up and a new ECU program since you want to control when you get all that boost (ie after 3000 RPM). Final problem is getting the power to the wheels. Most automatics in these small cars are not designed for 250+ HP but most manuals can handle more power. You probably will need to upgrade springs and shocks since that power would create a lot of wheel hop and certainly you'd need new motor/tranny mounts (ie the solid polys are common for high HP apps). Point to all this is there's a diminishing return to building out a car. If you target say 225-250 hp at 20 PSI, you will get a nice blend of practical plus the performance bump.