Meganewtons to Pounds-force (MN to lbf)

1 meganewton equals 224,808.9431 pounds-force (rounded).

How to convert meganewtons to pounds-force

To convert meganewtons to pounds-force, multiply the number of meganewtons by 224,808.9431. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply pounds-force by 0.000004448221615 (rounded).

pounds-force = meganewtons × 224,808.9431

Example: 10 meganewtons = 2,248,089.431 pounds-force.

About these units

Meganewton (MN)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million newtons. Used for rocket thrust.

Rocket launches are where the meganewton shows up most often. The Saturn V is listed at 34.5 MN of thrust at liftoff, a figure that would read as 34,500,000 N if written in plain newtons. The unit is simply the SI multiple 10^6 N, formed with the prefix mega, and the newton itself was named after Isaac Newton when the 9th General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted the name in 1948.

Civil engineers meet it too, since the loads carried by bridge cables, dam gates and building foundations are naturally counted in millions of newtons. It sits above the kilonewton, which Wikipedia notes as the scale of a steam locomotive's tractive effort or a jet engine's thrust, at roughly 130 kN. One meganewton is 1,000 kN, and in the older non-metric units it works out to about 225,000 pounds-force or roughly 102 tonnes-force, using 4.4482 N per pound-force and 9.80665 N per kilogram-force.

1 meganewton = 1,000,000 newtons (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Newton (unit); Wikipedia: Saturn V; Wikipedia: Pound (force)

Pound-force (lbf)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

Exactly 4.4482216152605 newtons: the weight of a one-pound mass under standard gravity. The US unit of force.

People have used the pound-force since the eighteenth century for low-precision work, long before anyone needed to define it carefully. A pound of material on Earth's surface pulls with about a pound of force, which made it convenient to treat the two as one. The twentieth century demanded a precise definition: one pound-force is the avoirdupois pound, exactly 0.45359237 kg, multiplied by standard gravity of 9.80665 meters per second squared, which comes to about 4.448 newtons.

Because the unit is not simply mass times acceleration in its own system, formulas in English engineering units need a conversion constant of about 32.174 pound-feet per pound-force second squared. A slug, 32.174049 pounds of mass, is what one pound-force accelerates at one foot per second squared. In the US, jet and rocket thrust is often given as pounds of thrust: each Space Shuttle solid rocket booster produced 3,300,000 pounds-force. Earth's gravity varies by up to about half a percent between equator and pole, which low-precision work can ignore.

1 pound-force = 4.448221615 newtons (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pound (force); NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

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