Turbocharger Manufacturing: From Büchi to ABB Robots

Turbocharger manufacturing is precision work. A turbo spins its turbine at up to 250,000 rpm, so every wheel, shaft and housing has to be right, and a small error shows up as vibration. This post follows the turbocharger from Alfred Büchi's 1905 patent to car engines, looks at where assembly and balancing are automated today, and asks where ABB's new AI Robot Trainer and its arms could fit. ABB Robotics has no public turbo-plant project, so that part is a possibility rather than a customer story.

A modern car turbocharger bolted to its exhaust manifold. Photo: Tiia Monto / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

From Büchi's patent to ship diesels and the first turbo cars

The 1905 patent by Alfred Büchi, a Swiss engineer working at Sulzer, is often considered the birth of the turbocharger. It described a compound radial engine with an exhaust-driven axial flow turbine and compressor mounted on one shaft. The first prototype was finished in 1915 to fight the power loss that aircraft engines suffer at altitude, but it was not reliable and never reached production. Auguste Rateau filed a similar patent in 1916, and in 1917 tests at Pikes Peak showed a turbocharger could hold sea-level power up to 4,250 metres.

Alfred Büchi, the Swiss engineer whose 1905 patent is often seen as the birth of the turbocharger, in an early portrait. Photo: Johannes Meiner / ETH-Bibliothek via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first commercial use came in June 1924, when the first heavy duty turbocharger, model VT402, left the Baden works of Brown, Boveri and Cie, under Büchi's supervision, for the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works in Winterthur. In 1925 Büchi fitted turbochargers to ten-cylinder diesels, lifting output from 1,300 to 1,860 kilowatts, and the engines went into two German passenger ships, the Preussen and Hansestadt Danzig. Saurer offered turbocharged truck engines from 1931. Brown Boveri later merged with Asea to form ABB, so this is partly ABB's own history. ABB's turbocharging division was rebranded Accelleron in 2022 and later spun off, so today's ABB Robotics has no turbo business of its own.

A 1932 photograph of a marine diesel engine being built at SLM Winterthur, the works that took the first heavy duty turbo in 1924. Photo: SLM Winterthur via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Cars took longer. Researchers in the 1950s struggled with turbo lag, the delay while the turbocharger reaches peak speed, and with the bulk of the unit, and the first turbocharged cars were the short-lived Chevrolet Corvair Monza and the Oldsmobile Jetfire, both in 1962. A turbo-powered engine won the 1968 Indianapolis 500, Porsche turbocharged its air-cooled flat six in 1973, and turbodiesels reached passenger cars in the 1970s with the Mercedes 300 D. Greater adoption in passenger cars came in the 1980s as a way to make smaller engines stronger.

A turbocharger fitted to the engine bay of a 1989 Pontiac Firebird Turbo Trans Am. Photo: Tobias ToMar Maier / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Balancing, assembling and inspecting turbos today

A turbocharger has a turbine on the hot exhaust side, a compressor on the intake side and a shaft joining them, with housings that guide the gas. The turbine can spin at up to 250,000 rpm, so small imbalances matter. Automated balancing is already common: Schenck RoTec's Xondo machines use a gantry loader to feed a turbine wheel, a measuring station records the unbalance and a correction station grinds material away in two planes. Its machines for compressor wheels run cycles of 25 to 60 seconds, depending on the version.

A cutaway turbocharger showing the turbine, shaft and compressor. Photo: Quentin Schwinn / NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A Slovak study of a real turbocharger balancing operation found that cyclic, repetitive and strenuous manual work could be automated, and proposed an automatic line built around balancing machines. Ascential Technologies lists automatic balancers and flow benches for turbocharger makers, among them BorgWarner. I found no public account of Garrett's or BorgWarner's own robot lines. Quality still matters: on 7 September 2026 CarBuzz ran the headline Small Turbo Engines Are Failing More Than The NA Engines They Replaced, which shows why makers want every unit measured and recorded.

A turbocharger with its compressor wheel exposed, the kind of part that is balanced after machining. Photo: Micool K / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB announced its AI Robot Trainer for OmniCore EyeMotion in mid October 2026 and showed it at the China International Industry Fair. ABB says the combined tools cut commissioning time by up to 90% and cycle time by up to 50% with automatic collision-free path planning, work with any camera brand and cover tasks from 2D pick and place to 3D bin picking, inspection, sorting and assembly. A turbo line has plenty of those jobs, such as picking castings, but ABB has not named a turbo customer. The ABB IRB 1700 family, announced the same month, adds a fast arm with 6 kg to 12 kg payloads.

The ABB Robotics stand at the China International Industry Fair in October 2026, where AI Robot Trainer and OmniCore EyeMotion were shown. Photo: ABB

Where turbo lines go next

Turbos come in very different sizes. The compressor wheel of a car unit fits in a palm, while the units on marine diesels are large enough to sit beside an engine room walkway. Heavier parts call for larger arms such as the IRB 6700, and smaller ones for compact arms like the IRB 1300 and IRB 1700. For drivers the interest is practical: units that fail less. Makers who can show a measured record for each unit may find that useful, even before robots get involved in assembly.

A large turbocharger on a ship's main engine, far bigger than a car unit. Photo: Eduard47 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Open problems are cost, safety and skills. Robots must hold machined parts without marking them, switch between turbo families, and share a line with technicians who check units by hand. Collaborative arms such as the GoFa and SafeMove zone monitoring let people and robots work closer, and the older IRB 360 FlexPicker or IRB 6700 can feed fixtures at higher speed. Skills matter too. ABB pitches EyeMotion at integrators who lack AI specialists, and our post on 3D vision picking explains the basics.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

A cell like this is usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, where reach, cycle time and collisions can be checked before any hardware moves. Related work on rotating parts is in our post on electric motor manufacturing. I expect robots to take on more loading, sorting and fastening around balancing machines first, with vision doing the sorting of mixed castings, and complete robotic turbo lines to follow only where volumes justify them.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

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