By Racerxlilbro on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 11:40 am:

What is the conversion factor from DIN Horsepower readings to SAE?

Allen? Allen? Hellloooooo? 

By Taffrsv on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 01:35 pm:

I don't know the exact formula but I've been told its approx 5%

Taff.  

By Racerxlilbro on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 01:48 pm:

Uh, five percent of what? You mean DIN is 5% less than SAE?

Hey, Jorge, can you hear me now? 

By Taffrsv on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 02:10 pm:

You should be able to transpose the formulas and work it out yourself


Horsepower is a measurement of the engine's ability to perform work. One SAE horse is the ability to lift 33,000 lbs one foot in one minute. One DIN horse is the ability to lift 450000 kg one cm in one minute. For the same power the SAE measurement is thus 98.629% of the metric DIN measurement.
If you see the term bhp, it just means "brake horsepower", which is the actual usable horsepower delivered to the rear wheels of the car. It is so named because a brake is applied to determine how much pressure is needed to stop or absorb the power. bhp could reference either DIN or SAE horsepower.

Power is effectively torque times rpms, so if you keep the same amount of torque and double the revs, you double the effective power. This is why most engines have the highest horsepower rating at higher RPMs. And along those lines, you can have an engine that has lots of horsepower at higher RPMs, but not much energy at lower RPMs where it counts off the line, so often torque ends up being a more interesting measurement than horsepower.

The formulas used are:

SAE = kW * 1.341
DIN = kW * 1.360  

By Racerxlilbro on Monday, July 29, 2002 - 03:12 pm:

Geez, you ask a guy for the time, he tells you how to build a watch!

Thanks for the info! 

By Crmc33 on Tuesday, July 30, 2002 - 12:34 am:

twenty past ten