Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 03:09:28 GMT From: ThisIsnopsamagestopping.net Subject: Re: torque vs. horsepower
Let us be sure we are talking about the same thing.If you mean at the tire's contact patch with the road surface, then yes, torque at that point is responsible for acceleration because it is the thing "pushing" on the road to make the car move. If you refer to the powerplant of the vehicle, however (that's the engine :), only the power it's developing is relevant to either. As you probably know from your studies, in the context of a drivetrain, torque can be freely exchanged for rpm and vice versa through simple gear reduction (the transmission :). This allows the use of either a low rpm, high torque powerplant (like a large diesel engine) or a high rpm, low torque powerplant (like a small racing engine) with the same horsepower to accomplish the same task. That the one engine produces, let's say, 2000 lbs-ft (or is that ft-lbs ;) of torque at its power peak and the other only, let's say, 200 is irrelevant because we can gear the one up or the other down in order to achieve the exact same torque at the transmission output shaft (and thus at the rear wheels), for any desired output shaft rpm. So, the answer to your query is that someone who says that is talking about two different points along the drivetrain. That sort of makes it a trick question, and certainly it is one which causes mass confusion and fallacy among those who don't quite understand all they know ;) HTH --Eoin On Thu, 18 Feb 1999 16:39:58 -0800, Julian Sweet <jsweetnopsamneering.ucsb.edu> wrote: >Could someone give me a technical, yet concise explanation as to why >torque is responsible for acceleration and horsepower for top speed? I >understand that torque is a rotational force and horsepower is power -- >but explain the connection please.... > > > > >
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