Torque Me Out of It

I don't know, I haven't seen it. I really didn't prepare for this podcast very well. You know what. In fact, scrap it, We're going to talk about Torque the rotational force insteady Joe, Well, we can't talk about that because at least one of us has seen it, Okay, So uh, we started thinking about this because we saw that video of pickup truck towing a Space shuttle. Yeah, which is huge. I mean you're literally huge. You're talking about literally literally huge.

Literally what you're talking about. You're talking about a standard pickup truck pulling the Space shuttle, which is enormous and heavy, and the fact that a standard truck could do it, Like, how could it? How could it generate the force necessary to do that? Um? And what is that force? Yeah? Of course the force is something the force. Of course. The force, of course is something you've probably heard about with relation to cars, like it's torque. Sure, yeah, but

what is torque? Um? And I didn't actually know when I had to look this up. Yeah, we're not pretty embarrassing, right, Um, But torque is really fundamental. It's something we should know. It's rotational force. Um. So if you just imagine that you have like a screw or a bolt with a nut on it. Came and say ice cube has a bolt with the nut on it on his motorcycle, right, and he wants to unscrew the nut. Um. So he gets a wrench out and he puts the wrench on

the nut and he pushes the wrench. What the force he's generating there is called torque. It's rotational force. So it's force going around a fulcrum involving a lever. Got you. And the way you'd calculate um torque is by multiplying the force you're applying to the wrench by the length of the wrench so by by changing the length of the wrench, you change the amount of rotational force, even if you are pushing the same amount. So if you have a shorter wrench and you're pushing a certain you're

exerting a certain amount of force on it. Versus a longer wrench and exerting uh, that same amount of force on it, it's a different amount of tork. Right. If you can let's say ice cube can apply two pounds of pressure to the wrench. Um, if he has a one ft wrench, that's two foot pounds of pressure of torque that he can put on that nut. But if he has a nine foot wrench, that's eighteen foot pounds of guts that he can of torque that he can apply to the nut. Um. So obviously having a longer

lever gives you a great advantage I see. Um. And this actually comes in when you're talking about transmissions and gears in cars. Um, So how does torque figure into a car? All? Right? So, torque in the sense of a vehicle. Uh, you know, vehicle's engine is all about generating torque, and it doesn't in a very kind of indirect way in a sense because you know, you've got an engine going. You've got a combust internal combustion engine going. Uh,

the main energy, the main power that you're generating. You're moving these pistons in and out of cylinders, right, That's what's called a reciprocating motion. So it's just going up and down. But you have to translate this into rotational motion. So those pistons are connected to a crank shaft, and a crank shaft its job is to rotate. It takes that reciprocating motion and translates into the rotational motion that is what powers the rest of the drive train, and

that's ultimately what's going to make the wheels turn. But to get there, we have to go through some interesting turns here. So the crankshaft connects to something that's called the the flywheel. The fly wheel is connected to a clutch plate, and the clutch plate is connected to handbone, and the handbone is connected to think about no, no, no. The clutch plate is connected to a pressure plate, and that's where we are allowed to shift gears without everything

grinding to a halt. Right in a manual transmission car, that is where the clutch connects when you when you depress, when when when you press it on the clutch, that is actually disconnecting the engine from the entire transmission right right, It lifts that pressure plate so that you no longer are getting power from the engine delivered to the drive train, because otherwise, all those gears that are in the rest of what I'm about to describe would be turning and

uh and the shifting would be very messy to the point where you could cause huge amounts of damage to your vehicle. That's why you know, using the clutch and a manual transmission is so important. Automatic transmissions it all takes care of that for you, assuming everything's working correctly.

All right. So you've got the flywheel and you've got the clutch plate and everything that that it's in turn is connected to what's called the gear shaft, which continues transmitting this rotational force, or the lay shaft is connected to the gear shaft. So you've got gear shaft going into lay shaft. The lay shaft has lay shaft gears on it. UH. These are gears that are directly connected to the lay shaft. And you start off with some small gears on the lay shaft and they get progressively

larger as you go down the lay shaft. Keep in mind, I'm just kind of describing a typical manual transmission vehicle here. They are. They do come in different variations. But so you've got that small gear on the end and they get progressively larger as it goes on. You have a second shaft that's near this lay shaft. It's called the main shaft, all right. The main shaft also has gears on it. The gears go from large too small, and they interconnect with the the lay shaft gears. Now here's

the thing. If all of those gears were turning at the same time, you wouldn't have any way of shifting gears, right, they would all be speed would be a single speed, yeah, you would. You would have one single range of motion you go in before you start to burn out your engine. So in order to have those gears turn freely without necessarily turning anything else in the vehicle, those gears are all mounted on ball bearings, right, so they can turn. The lay scheft gears can turn and turn and turn.

The main scheft gears will turn, but they're not turning the main shaft itself. The main shaft can remain completely still while those gears are turning around and around because they're just mounted on it. Yeah, exactly, they're floating it, thank you, Lauren. And then you have what is called the dog clutch or dog collar, which engages the side of these uh main cheft gears. There, the main scheft gears have these holes along the side of the gear.

The dog clutch or dog collar has these teeth along the side of it. And when that connects to the gear uh the MOE, the turning motion of the main shaft gear translates over into turning motion on that dog clutch or dog color, which then provides the rotational force necessary to move further down the drive train, ultimately ending

at the tires. Right. Uh yeah, These these dog collars are what are connected to your gear shift in for example, a five speed manual car um and and that's that's what you're engaging with two right to to connect all of the shafts together and get that power out. And only one dog clutch or dog collar is engaged at any one time. Right, So if you're in first gear, that a dog clutches in that first main shaft gear.

And because the main shift gear is large and the lay shaft gear is small that lay shaft gears, turning it more rotations per minute, and that's quite a bit of speed. But it's then translating that to a larger gear, which decreases the speed. You get fewer rotations per minute, but it increases the torque. That's where you get the torque in those low gears. And the important part of the torque at low gears is that you're trying to move a vehicle from a still position to being in motion,

and that takes a lot of force. It's like it's like using a longer handled lever exactly. Yeah, if you've got a really heavy vehicle, then you're gonna need a good amount of force to get it moving. But once it gets moving, and once it starts to UH to hit, it's its top speed in that gear, you need to shift to a higher gear in order to make sure

you're not making the engine work too hard. It's just gonna start burning out otherwise, And so that's when you would in a manual transmission car press on the clutch. You would disengage the drive train from the engine. You would be able to then shift from one to two. The dog clutch would disengage from the first main shift gear and engage the second main shift gear. Uh. Now you have a dog clutch between every couple of gears, So between one and two, between three and four, and

between five and reverse. Reverse is a little different because you actually have to have a third smaller gear in between the main shift gear and the lay shaft gear to reverse the rotation direction. And you also have another set of gears further down the drive train that that changes the rotational direction for the tires to work. Otherwise you would be trying to put trying to turn the tires in a direction that's not aligned with their actual uh, the way they're mounted in a car. So you have

to use differential too. That's exactly I have to move independently. That's true as well. Yes, all of that is important for it to work. And what we just described really is a manual five speed, manual transmission rear wheel drive car. But there are lots of different variations of this that have different layouts, and in fact, an automatic transmission is different in that all of these different gears. These gears and when you're talking about the small gear to the

large gear, that's what we're talking about. Gear ratios with an automatic transmission, all those gears are located within one device essentially, and it is a little difficult to describe without visual representation, but it's the same process that more or less that's going on with a manual transmission. It's just that they're all those gears are located in this

one thing. It's really awesome the way it works, but it's almost impossible for me to describe without pictures that the furthest dig out was that it kind of looks like that thing from Event Horizon, and then I just my brain shut. That's I think that's I think that's important for everyone. And if you don't recognize that, you need to go out and watch Event Horizon in the

dark by yourself, preferably. It's amazing that the entire drive train of a car, with all of the complicated parts it has in it, is just taking a twisting motion from one place to another, and it's also having to translate that twisting motion to different directions, right because because you'll have rear differentials, right, Yeah, you get to a point where, yeah, you get a white where you need to translate that rotationary force so that it will turn

tires in such a way that will move the vehicle, and that means actually shifting the direction of the road the rotating motion. What you do with more gears, it's just a different alignment of gears to uh make sure that the tires are are turning properly. Otherwise they would uh they you, your car would just not work. It would't it wouldn't turn, the wheels wouldn't turn because the

rotational force would not be in the right direction. So I've heard people make the distinction between torque and horsepower, um, And apparently that's kind of a gearhead distinction to make, but essentially the way it comes down to in practical uses, you would often describe like a very powerful truck or something like that as being torque heavy, having strong torque because it it's good at um getting the ball rolling

like initial huge load to a slow roll. Um. Whereas I think and correct me if I'm wrong, But usually you'd hear horsepower more often talking about like a very powerful engine like in a sports car or something. Yeah, that's not unusual at all, that can deliver work over time and distance. That's accurate, I would say, I think

that I think you summed it up well. Yeah, now, I feel free to write in if you know more about cars than I do, they're gonna be writing in about my uh my summary because I I oversimplified and I think I probably use crankshaft at least once when I met gear shaft. But that's because I was glancing at my notes hurriedly, right, and I'm not and I'm not a car. Also also technically that the gear shaft is usually called a laft. That's true, It's a lay shaft.

The gear shafts attached to the lay shaft, which has the lay shaft gears. Yeah, so we're but we're here to talk about the future, okay, right, Yeah, this is this is all. This is all how and have been basically working since the early right. I thought this topic was kind of funny because I started to think about it, and what on earth is the future of torque. I mean, engines in the future will be so strong they will

turn the wheels really hard, bigger. I think I think that's part of it, though, I mean, you look at some of the enormous vehicles that we have we have designed over the years, like some of the truly enormous ones, things like the stuff that has to move rockets and space shuttles like the the the huge ones that go at a snail's pace, crawling towards the launch pad carrying

an entire launch vehicle on them. These things have to generate huge amounts of torque in order to be able to move across the ground, you know, So we wouldn't have been able to do that a hundred years ago. And part of that is not just I mean, the very the very nature of torque is not going to change, right,

That's a fundamental things. But but it's but it's our ability to generate that that changes, and that's based upon making stronger engines and building stronger materials that can withstand this huge amount of force that we apply to them in order to translate that into torque. So there is a future, it's just we're talking about improving mechanical processes rather than like the torque itself remains unchanged, because that's

just a fundamental thing, right. It's also about the efficiency of an engine because um, you know, right now automatic transmissions might have um up to up to eight gears, up to eight speeds working in them, and and they're constantly developing these more and more complex automatic transmissions right now, nine and ten speeds are the next big thing that's being expected to debut in uh or so, And that's that's important because it does keep the engine from having

to work too hard. Uh. And it also makes those those transit transitions from one speed to the next much more smooth, right. It just it allows the engine to work within its optimal parameters. Excellent, it's happy place, happy place. Yeah. So, so that way, the engine is always operating exactly where it best works and not. It doesn't have to do too much work to go from one gear to the next, you know, it doesn't. It doesn't have to operate in the red for too long in order for it to

switch from one gear to the next. Could it could wind up saving gas mileage by five to ten showing up one gear. That's that's fantastic, not only for a person's checkbook or whatever, or their wallet, but also for

the environment. So so I was curious. I asked a friend of mine, who works on cars and who does know about cars, what some of these advances might have been in the you know, in recent decades, or maybe not even that reason, but just in the history of cars that have made them generate more torque UM, and he gave a couple of examples that I thought were interesting.

One thing he suggested was possibly a fuel injection okay, sure, the way the it injects fuel like ionized or atomized, yeah, atomized fuel that helps the pistons generate more torque when they explode. UM and internal combustion, external combustion. Right. He mentioned UM more more precise machining tolerances, and that was interesting to me, just the idea that UM. You know, as as our factories get smarter and our ways of making engines get more and more precise, you're having a

tighter fit between the piston and the cylinder. UM, just because I guess we're better at make yeah right, right, we're their machine operated, our machine made, rather than human made. And the computer design can be far more precise than what a person would be able to at this point. And this really close fit apparently enables the engine to generate more force, and we could see other applications of torque UH in the future. One of the things we

talked about were space elevators. This idea of a vehicle that climbs a ribbon that reaches all the way out into space. Clearly, you would have to have a vehicle, some sort of climbing vehicle that would be able to generate quite a bit of torque to climb such a ribbon. So that would be another future application of it. It's uh, not necessarily that we don't have the the climbing technology right now that could do this. We might very well

be able to make such a vehicle. It's the tether that's giving us the real sticking problem with that one. But the whole other episode about that. Yeah, but that's a but that's a possible uh you know, future use of or application of torque. Well, it's just, um, right now, when we go to space, we only have one way

to do it. And it's funny because when you think about it, there aren't really all that many different ways we know about to make something go right well, and once we get into space there are a few more options we have. But getting to space is you know, it's pretty much you need a you need a rocket. Here on Earth, that rotational force is really the most

useful thing. Um, what whether you're talking about tires or tank treads or well, it's so easy, yeah, I mean, there's no reason to have a rocket powered car unless you just want to get in the Darwin Awards. Yeah, or you have an award winning series on Discovery yea or or or or yeah, if you want to get into the eighth dimension. Where are we going dimension next?

When we get there real soon? Yeah? Anyway, But um, so I started to think about what are all the different ways that you can make something go that you can power a vehicle. Um. So, obviously there is friction and and if we're talking about going into space, that could be relevant in terms of space elevators, Like you just have a climber vehicle, it rolls up a tether or something like that, and that wouldn't necessarily be limited to Earth. You could have that coming off of a

moon or um space station other Yeah, anything like that. Um. But then once you're in space, you've got trouble because you can't roll. You have never seen me roll in space? Man? Well you can, you know you can, you can roll, but you can't. You can't. You can't use that's fair. I can't drive, You're right, Um, no, you can't. So we we have modern rockets are what's known as a reaction drive, right, and they move by throwing something with

mass out the back of them. Right. Yeah, you're burning, You're burning chemicals to blow stuff out the back, which then pushes you forward. That equal and opposite reaction deal where you've got the either it's liquid or solid chemical rockets that are just burning through this fuel. Uh not. I mean it will move you really quickly, but it also weighs a lot, and it's hard to get that stuff off the planet and still have enough to space.

And the nice thing about space is that once you start generating a good amount of speed, nothing's really slowing you down until you start encountering other things like gravity or if there are enough particles to exert friction on you, that'll make you slow over time, but much less than say, in Earth's atmosphere. Right, So, so yeah, you've got that.

You also have gravity. I mentioned gravity. You can use gravity to help help you propel you distances in space, but you have to plan your trajectory very precisely in that slingshot kind of action. That's exact mass driver things. Well. Also, the Voiageer spacecraft use gravity. They use the gravity of the outer planets to propel them toward the edge of the Solar System, which they are still heading towards I

see what you're saying. The slingshot most Sorry I didn't catch that first, Like you go around the Sun and it throws you out of orbit or or yeah, you're not going not going completely around really close right, Yeah, yeah, you have to You have to plan your trajectory just right so that you are going right or you're getting the influence of the plant's gravity, but not so much that's actually pulling you toward the surface. It's just enough to sling you a little bite direction you want to go.

You spend a very very short amount of time traveling with the planet in its rotational direction, and then you use the speed of that planet a moving through space and be its rotational direction to sling shut you off. And the voyager spacecraft us that in order to both visit all the plants they needed to and then to move toward interstellar space, which they're still heading toward. That's

really smart, you know. They're also their reaction drives that aren't chemically based, like they're not caused by setting something on fire and shooting exhaust out. You can have electrical reaction drives that like I that are that are throwing particles at the back, right, and you can have sales solar sales. Yeah, that's an interesting one I wanted to talk about. You know, they harness both the solar wind

and just the radiation pressure exerted by the sunlight. Right, because the particles that the sun blasts out actually don't have mass, or at least we say they are massless, but they have something called relativistic mass. Yeah. Does that basically mean that we need this thing for math to work?

So therefore no, no, no, well kind of, but it really means that that photons have momentum, and because we have already defined momentum as mass and velocity, we sort of need them to have mass for it to make sense. But in that sense, yes, it's so that the math makes sense. But to get more into it, we would have to go all quantum and uh, honestly, I haven't had enough sugar to get there. So anyway you could

argue that photons have no mass. It makes it easy, especially when you're talking about the wave like, uh, properties properties of photons. But in a in a sense, they do have a mass. It's a relativistic mass, whatever way

you explain it. They push, they definitely do, because there's a great video on YouTube about how much does a shadow way, which is really the idea that when you when you have cloud cover over the Earth and no sunlight is hitting that part of the Earth, it's actually weighing a little less because it doesn't have the pressure of the planet heavy. Huh. Well, we talked about radiation pressure in an upcoming video that I'm very excited about. Yeah,

me too. I'm excited because I've already shot that video to learn about it in the near future. Well, but this is cool. You could actually make a sailboat in space. Basically you just spread out a big old sale to just let the sunlight push you and the solar winds, the particles coming out of the upper atmosphere of the sun um and so there are more ways to get in around in space than I would have thought. It's a it's a lot easier to do was getting out in pushing Scotty had to do that once or twice

with the Enterprise. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't like to talk about. It doesn't doesn't reflect well on him being an engineer at all. Okay, guys, we're gonna wrap up this discussion before we do. We want to address something that went out on our previous podcast on Wednesday May about bacterial uh well bacteria that can do different stuff. Yeah. If you heard an early, uncorrected version of that podcast, you may have heard us claim that the bacteria is integral

to the production of beer. Well, it turns out that's not so much the case, and we really should have known better. Um. In fact, in fact, we both did no better, but for some reason, our brains just clicked off at that point. Yeah, as it turns out, it's not bacteria that produces beer, it's yeast. Yeast, of course, which is a fungus, not a bacterial sport. And so the version of the podcast that exists now stands corrected. But in case you heard one of those earlier versions,

we wanted to make sure to set things right. Yep. Um, So don't go disagreeing with your homebrewing friends. They're they're right. Yeast as a fungus, yes, and uh, it's still on micro organism. It's still something that's taking one substance and emitting another that we find very useful. So in that way, it's similar to but apart from that, very different organisms. So I'm glad we managed to clear that up. Hopefully

we haven't caused too much damage along the way. Guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking stuff that we should really tackle and discuss, you know, things about the future that really have you excited, let us know. Send us an email. Our address is FW thinking at discovery dot com or go to FW thinking dot com. That's our website where we've got the blogs, we've got the podcasts, we've got the videos, we've got social media. Get in touch with us and be part

of our conversation. We really look forward to hearing from you, and we'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's go Places,