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
Imagine that you are trying to push a pile of rocks from A to B. There are two things that will definitely affect how fast you can get that pile from point A to point B. One is how hard you can push at all. Depending on the rock, you might not even be strong enough to budge it one little bit, but somebody who is stronger might still be able to move it. Another is how fast you can move it once you get it moving. Maybe you’re not super strong, but you’re extremely fit cardiovascularly, so you can move that object faster than somebody who might be stronger but less fit. On the other hand, if you’re moving something really close to the maximum weight you can push, you might have to take breaks. Who knows?
For an engine, the maximum torque is the equivalent of the heaviest object you can push. The maximum horsepower is the equivalent of the weight of the rock you can push times how fast you can push it — as in, how fast can you move one heap of rocks equaling a particular weight from location A to B. But of course that’s limited by the weight of the rocks in the sense that if all the rocks are too heavy to push, you won’t get anywhere at all.
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