Supercharger Impeller Design

[Champ87]

At the weekend I swapped out the OEM filter for a Sprint P08 filter. Looking at the impeller I noticed the shape was different to images I’d seen when the bike was announced.

The original technical information contains quite a detailed description of the in-house design of the impeller: “The 69mm impeller features 6 blades at the tip, expanding to 12 blades at the base.” Information released to the press and dealers includes an image of this shape.



It looks very pretty……..and different from what’s in our bikes. Mine has a simpler 6 blade design. Out of curiosity I checked the service manual and found the same 6 blade impeller is shown. I confirmed it with the image in the Supercharger Axial Play thread on this site – although I must admit it didn’t catch my eye when I first saw that image.



Obviously, no big deal. There are plenty of reasons why Kawasaki might make a change for production bikes but after reading the description of the “original impeller” it grabbed my attention when I saw we have something different.

More trivia for the knowledge library.

[JMod45]

I haven't looked into the service manual, or gotten in to look between the blades, but I'm fairly certain they did not change the design.

You can't see the entire impeller from the air box, you're only seeing the top 6 blades. I'm guessing if you were to get a borescope in between the blades, you would see the base 12 blades.

[UFO]

The H2SX impeller design is still probably a 12 blade design. You just can't see them in the picture above (which is my picture), because the impeller design is fairly deep, and we're only seeing the tips of the long blades, not the six short blades hidden deeper in the housing.

Here are some shots of a torn down H2 supercharger which only shows 6 blades at the entrance, and looks almost identical to the H2 SX. But the 3rd picture shows how the housing surrounds the impeller and it gets larger the deeper you go into the housing, thus hiding the 6 shorter blades. When we take the air filter off we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg so to speak.

[Champ87]

Thanks guys. Those pics make it a lot clearer. I'll take a closer look next time I pull the filter for cleaning - just out of curiosity.

[stk0308]

Speaking of the impeller, sorta. Has anyone pinned down how much boost it's actually generating? PSi, bar, whatever?

[Kwee]

Speaking of the impeller, sorta. Has anyone pinned down how much boost it's actually generating? PSi, bar, whatever?

Between 17 and 20 psi