Before I was enrolled
into a physics class I always thought that horse power was related to
one special horse that could pull a good amount of weight. If
that horse pulled 1000 pounds that would of been classified as one
horse power. So basically i thought that people hooked up weight
to the back of vehicles to figure for their horsepower. If a car
could haul 2000 pounds it would effectively have 2 horsepower and if
the car pulled 10000 pounds it would have the equavalence of 10
horses. Come to think of it a small 4 cylinder car today has
around 100 horsepower and I can't really see one of those hauling
around 100000 pounds of weight behind it. It would be the other
way around that is if the pile of junk could sprout legs and move.
In reality horse power is related to the power unit called a watt. 1 Horsepower = 746 watts. James Watt invinted this unit of power while making steam engines more effiecient. Since the steams engines he was creating was outputting loads of watts he came up with a bigger unit to represent a bunch of smaller ones. There are many different stories on how he came up with this unit of power but they all come out to the same 550 ft*lb/s. Also most of the stories ended up with James Watt observing a draft horse pulling a certain amount of weight for a period of time and then conducted some math to come up with the unit of horsepower. Basically my theory was correct in the beginning I just didn't quite think about the time factor.
How would one calculate the horse power, well one way is to do it the old fashioned way by using an equation and this equation calculates the power in watts. P=W/(change in time).
W is the amount of work done by a force in which this case is a car. The change in time which is basically the amount of time the force of the car did work. When the amount of work is divided by the change in time we get our answer watts and when this is divided by 746 watts we recieve the amount of power in the untis of horsepower.
http://isiria.wordpress.com
http://www.autoclub.com.au/2007/12/supercharged-ls9-v8-engine.html
In reality horse power is related to the power unit called a watt. 1 Horsepower = 746 watts. James Watt invinted this unit of power while making steam engines more effiecient. Since the steams engines he was creating was outputting loads of watts he came up with a bigger unit to represent a bunch of smaller ones. There are many different stories on how he came up with this unit of power but they all come out to the same 550 ft*lb/s. Also most of the stories ended up with James Watt observing a draft horse pulling a certain amount of weight for a period of time and then conducted some math to come up with the unit of horsepower. Basically my theory was correct in the beginning I just didn't quite think about the time factor.
How would one calculate the horse power, well one way is to do it the old fashioned way by using an equation and this equation calculates the power in watts. P=W/(change in time).
W is the amount of work done by a force in which this case is a car. The change in time which is basically the amount of time the force of the car did work. When the amount of work is divided by the change in time we get our answer watts and when this is divided by 746 watts we recieve the amount of power in the untis of horsepower.
http://isiria.wordpress.com
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