eli5: what is torque in a car
In: 2
when you try to open a pickle jar… torque is a measure of the pressure you are using to open it…if the lid was the wheel
imagine you put 1 horse in front of your car, It needs a bit of time but eventually will get the car moving forward. to do this the horse has to use a lot of strength but will eventually get to it’s maximum speed.
now you put 10 horses in front of your car, they will less time to get moving, they will also need less strength to start moving as well less time to get to the maximum speed.
the Torque or horsepower (hp) is an indicator how much strength the engine in your car will have and how “easy” it is for the car to go top speed.
Torque is a measure of how strong the car can turn its wheels. Turning the wheels strong is different from turning them fast.
For example, imagine a wheel in a lab that is connected with 1:1 gear ratio to the engine. The wheel will be turning ridiculously fast like 2000RPM mid air, but if it’s touching the road, it’s gonna lose a lot of energy from friction and take a lot of time to accelerate, not to mention having limited top speed.
But if the wheel:engine has 1:10 ratio, the wheel turns only once for 10 engine rotations. That is, compare to 1:1 ratio, that same engine is doing 10 times more work to turn the wheel once. Torque tells you this characteristics.
Horse power is a performance of the engine and only the engine. Torque involves not only the engine but also crank shafts, transmission, wheels etc.
Torque is the force acting along the rotation of the wheel or gear (or along any rotating object). If you take a lever that is one meter long and apply one Newton of force to the end of it, you create 1 Newton-meter of torque.
If you multiply the torque of a rotation by the speed of that rotation, then you get the power applied to the rotating object. That power can be stated in terms of horsepower.
In order to start rotating, the wheel (or gear) has to overcome a certain threshold torque based on the object it is moving against. This is why if you aren’t in low gear, the car won’t start moving.
For you to understand it’s basically a measure of grip. If you were manually trying to open a glass sliding door with your palms, that is like torque. That’s what your wheels are doing… How much they are pushing the ground. High horsepower is just power.. power can be changed to fast moving wheels with low torque or slow moving wheels with high torque. Think of a tractor with large, slow wheels pulling things as high torque. Think of a race car in gravel spinning it’s wheels add low torque.
Latest Answers