[Vwdiesel] torque vs. horsepower (was: something worth trading the A4 in for)
Terry Briggs
vbriggs at stny.rr.com
Mon Jul 7 21:55:13 PDT 2008
Roger, you are the man !
On Jul 7, 2008, at 12:13 AM, Roger Brown wrote:
> David Schwarze wrote:
>> What you say below is simply not true. Horsepower DOES move things.
>> More HP will get you down the road more quickly, regardless of torque.
>>
>> The units of HP and Torque tell the story. Power (hp) is a quantity
>> that you can use along with the weight of the vehicle, friction,
>> aerodynamic drag, etc. to predict how quickly a car will accelerate.
>> It
>> is a measure of how much work is being done. Accelerating a car is
>> work.
>>
>> Torque is a measurement of rotational force which CANNOT be used to
>> predict how quickly a car will accelerate (why not, you say? Because
>> "it depends" on the RPM).
>>
>> For a real world example, take a sport bike. That fits your
>> definition
>> of "massive amounts of hp and little to no torque". Ever race one of
>> those at a stoplight in your diesel VW? I'm sure with the massive
>> torque of the diesel engine that poor sport bike didn't stand a
>> chance,
>> right?
>
> Torque, via the gearing in the transaxle, it what turns the
> wheels/tires to push the car
> forward. More torque, whether in raw form out of the engine or via
> reduction gearing in
> the transmission equals more force transferred by the tires to the
> road and more force
> acting on a given vehicle mass (or weight) results in an equal and
> opposite force (per
> Isaac Newton) called acceleration. The units of torque are the same
> as the units of work,
> force over a distance. And if you take things to finer and finer
> increments of time (in
> mathematical terms), the RPM factor goes away, acceleration is defined
> as the derivative
> of velocity with respect to time (dv/dt) and is simply reduces to the
> mass and the force
> acting upon it.
>
> Power (or horsepower) is in units of work per unit of time. That will
> tell your how much
> work an engine can produce over a given period time. Since engine HP
> is a function of
> torque and RPM, you can vary both of those factors via gearing, tire
> size, etc. And since
> HP is a combination of these two values (torque and RPM) and since in
> typical internal
> combustion engines torque varies with RPM, it is hard to separate the
> two factors.
>
> Imagine one engine with a very peaky torque curve with tuned intakes
> and exhaust made for
> maximum power/torque output at some high RPM. And then an engine with
> the same overall HP
> but one with a fairly flat torque vs. RPM curve. If you use both
> engines to accelerate a
> vehicle, (assuming fixed gearing) you need to integrate the torque
> over the range of RPMs
> from beginning to end to get the overall time to speed. Think of
> taking the area under
> the HP vs. RPM curve. A broad flatter HP curve has more area under it
> than one that is
> shaped like a triangle. A flatter curve is the result of a torque
> that builds up at a low
> RPM and holds fairly constant at the RPM rises. A steeper curve is
> the result of an
> engine where the torque keeps rising with RPM.
>
> And yes, a 50 HP gas engine in a motorcycle will out accelerate a 50HP
> diesel engine in an
> automobile. Why? Weight. Put 50 HP behind a 300 lb. bike and put in
> gearing to drop the
> high revving, low torque engine output down to a usable value for the
> load, that low
> torque times the gear reduction results in a large torque at the wheel
> and that torque
> times the lower mass equals higher acceleration. Put 50 HP behind a
> 2000 lb. Rabbit and
> guess what, it is slower to accelerate than a 6 times lighter
> motorcycle.
>
> So it all really boils down to the fact that torque is the fundamental
> unit and is what an
> engine produces. RPMs are just the result of what the engine is
> connected to and what
> that load does in response to the applied torque. HP is just the
> derived product of the
> supplied torque and the resultant RPM.
>
> --
>
> Roger
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>
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