Jerry Seinfeld once quipped, “Why will we even use the term ‘horsepower’? Is that to further humiliate horses? The space shuttle rockets have 20 million horsepower. Is there any point in still comparing it to the horses?” Yes, Jerry, it’s because kilowatts and megawatts aren’t as poetic. Gigawatts is a cool word, though, so long as you pronounce it as “jigawatts” like Doc Brown. Still, horsepower has a superb ring to it, and it’s just more fun to say that a Koenigsegg One:1 has 1,341 mighty steeds, or an Airbus A380 has a complete of 300,000 stallions powering its gravity-defying trajectory into the sky.
Take a look at that last number again. 300,000 horsepower at takeoff! Splitting that figure between the jet’s 4 engines yields 75,000 horsepower each. Convert 300,000 horses back to science-speak, and also you get 224 megawatts. Now, that is probably not poetic, but it surely does have a terrifying ring to it, like we’re equating jet thrust with nuclear explosion power.
Possibly Christian Von Koenigsegg was on to something with the one-megawatt option. Let’s examine how megawatt rolls off the tongue in a sentence: With greater than a megawatt of power at its disposal, Koenigsegg broke its own record by going 0-250-0 mph in 28.27 seconds within the Jesko. Ooh, okay — perhaps megawatt can stir strong emotions.
Comparing piston-driven apples to turbine oranges
Automotive engines and jet engines work on thoroughly different principles – unless you should discuss the Chrysler turbine automotive – so discussing the horsepower rankings of jets requires digging into technical nitty-gritty. The variety of jets you see in most, if not all, business airliners are turbofans, though there are other jet types, resembling ramjets, scramjets, turbojets, and turboprops, amongst others.
In a turbofan, incoming air goes through the primary set of fan blades and gets channeled in two directions concurrently. These are the core compressor and a burner, where it’s ignited and sent through a nozzle, in addition to across the engine to create thrust like a traditional propeller. The nozzle thrust and fan thrust mix to offer a whole thrust package.
Since it is a automotive enthusiast website, you are probably at the least passingly accustomed to how piston engines operate – tiny explosions push pistons to convert up-down energy to rotation energy – so let’s deal with the vital point that piston engine power figures measure shaft power. The conversion process to seek out what a jet engine’s shaft power can be is surprisingly easy. Multiply the jet’s thrust, which is pounds-force (lbf), by the airspeed of the aircraft. You may either break out your TI-86 from college or go to the Calculator Academy website’s Thrust to Horsepower calculator.
The present strongest jet engine on the planet, GE Aerospace’s GE9X, can produce 134,300 lbf. That is the engine that will likely be utilized in Boeing’s 777X, which is able to reach an estimated top speed of 652 mph. For the reason that 777X uses two GE9X engines, we’ll put 268,600 lbf in for thrust. Multiply 268,600 by 652, and we get an astounding 467,006 hp, or about 467 Bugatti Veyrons, plus or minus a lawnmower.
Probably the most jet horsepower you’ll be able to experience at once
For the reason that Boeing 777X is not technically an airliner you’ll be able to fly on yet, let’s do the horsepower calculation for the present Boeing 777. The 777 can top out at 683 mph and uses a pair of GE’s GE90-115B turbofan engines, which produce 115,000 lbf each. That also comes out to a healthy 418,907 hp. For metric system fans, that is 312 Megawatts.
Should you want larger numbers, you haven’t got to stick to horses. AnimalHorsePower.com has a comparison tool where you’ll be able to convert the pulling power of horses to dozens of other animals. Interestingly, the tool says that a horse can put out about 28 horsepower max, which is barely barely greater than what biologists R.J. Wassersug and R.D. Stevenson estimated in 1993, which was about 24 horsepower.
Sticking with that 28 hp figure, the horsepower converter tool estimates a chimpanzee has the identical peak output as 0.03 horses, or a max of 0.87 hp. So, in a sentence that surely hasn’t been written before, the Boeing 777 has 481,502 chimp power (cp?), which equates to 359 megawatts. There isn’t any way you woke up this morning pondering you’d have the tools to directly convert the strength of chimps to megawatts, and yet, here you’re. Take into consideration that in your next business flight.
This Article First Appeared At www.jalopnik.com
