I have worked on equipment most of my life and still don’t understand.
nearly all energy put into an ice engine that isn’t lost as heat goes to spinning a shaft. please explain to me how i can tell the difference between torque and horse power?
In: Physics
Once upon a time inventor James Watt was comparing newfangled steam engines to each other. There are two main ways to measure the output of a machine that applies rotational force. Torque is a measure of how much turning force it applies. A steam engine with high torque was very good for moving heavy loads from a stop. On the other hand, you could also measure how many rotations the engine produced in one minute, or RPM. Ideally you would want an engine that had both high rotational force (high torque) applied very rapidly (high RPM) but because of physics this is hard, and engines that run at high RPM tend to have lower torque.
“Shut up, nerd,” said the mine owners Watt was trying to convince to buy steam engines. “I don’t care about any of that, all I know about is horses, and I only care how long it will take one of your steam engines to do the job.” Thus, the unit of horsepower was born: about the amount of work that an average horse can do in one second. Horsepower solved the torque vs. RPM dilemma because if you’re just measuring the amount of work per second you can compare high torque / low RPM engines directly to low torque / high RPM engines. You can multiply torque and RPM together and then if you know the load you know how long it will take the engine to do the job. And presumably sell more steam engines to mine owners, as that’s the metric they’re most interested in
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