Most of us enjoy the smooth and effortless feeling of driving in an automatic transmission car. The driving is effortless because you don’t need to worry about gear changing and you don’t have a clutch pedal to operate.
source/image: Learn Engineering
In an automatic transmission car the work, of the clutch pedal, is automatically done by a hidden component, which is truly an engineering marvel, the torque converter. The torque converter can even multiply the torque. Let’s see how this purely mechanical device performs its tasks.
A torque converter is a type of fluid coupling which transfers rotating power from a prime mover, like an internal combustion engine, to a rotating driven load.
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In a vehicle with an automatic transmission, the torque converter connects the power source to the load. It is usually located between the engine’s flexplate and the transmission. The equivalent location in a manual transmission would be the mechanical clutch.
