At the last in-person SEMA show, Turbosmart made waves with its electronic wastegate actuators which utilized the company’s line of proven 90-degree wastegates. This year, it has not only refined that electro-mechanical actuation system, but also developed an inline valve to replace the traditional poppet-style valve of traditional wastegates.
“We just came out with the Straight-Gate, which is an electronically controlled butterfly valve wastegate. It flips the concept of wastegates 90 degrees,” says Turbosmart’s Richard Andresen. “Obviously, this is something that everyone has wanted to do, but no one has been able to do efficiently. Once we created the electronic control unit two years ago, we had a motor that was strong enough to fight against exhaust pressure.”
The straight-through design has some immediately obvious benefits, like increased flow. “This wastegate outflows our previous highest flowing wastegate, making it the highest flowing wastegate on the market,” says Andresen. Another not-so-obvious benefit is that the butterfly valve allows for much more linear boost control.
To complement both the new Straight-Gate50 and the previous line of eGates, Turbosmart has released a new control unit dubbed simply The Black Box. “When we first released our electronically controlled wastegates, no one had the technology to control it. But, over the past two years, companies like FuelTech, Haltech, and MoTec were able to get it working with their own protocols,” Andresen explains.
“We came out with our Black Box, which is essentially an intelligent driver that can handle high amperage output and translate that PWM signal into CAN-BUS protocol so that you can integrate with ECU systems that don’t have a protocol for this already. This will up the game for the eGates as well, because before, you were limited by which ECU you were using.”
An additional feature of the Black Box is that, as a high-amperage PWM controller, it can also be used to operate high-amp fuel pumps. Turbosmart is really elevating the boost control game with its offerings at the 2021 SEMA Show.