Pounds Per Square Foot to Bars (psf to bar)
1 pound per square foot equals 0.0004788025898 bars (rounded).
How to convert pounds per square foot to bars
To convert pounds per square foot to bars, multiply the number of pounds per square foot by 0.0004788025898. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply bars by 2,088.543423 (rounded).
bars = pounds per square foot × 0.0004788025898
Example: 10 pounds per square foot = 0.004788025898 bars.
About these units
Pound Per Square Foot (psf)
About 47.88 pascals. Used in US structural engineering for distributed loads.
A square foot is 144 square inches, so one pound per square foot is one 144th of a psi, which comes to about 47.88 Pa; NIST gives 47.88026. The number is easy to picture: spread one pound-force evenly over a floor tile a foot across and that is the pressure, tiny compared with the 101,325 Pa of one standard atmosphere.
Building codes in the United States commonly state loads on floors and roofs this way, and snow and wind pressures are tabulated in the same unit. Metric countries use kilopascals or newtons per square metre instead, and 1 kPa is about 20.9 psf. Multiplying a psf figure by 144 gives psi, and by 47.88 gives pascals, so a 40 psf floor load is about 1.9 kPa.
1 pound per square foot = 47.88025898 pascals (approximately).
Sources: NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8; Wikipedia: Pounds per square inch
Bar (bar)
Exactly 100,000 pascals, close to atmospheric pressure at sea level. Used for tire pressure, diving and industrial gauges.
Bar began as a name that meant different things to different people. It comes from the Ancient Greek baros, weight, and from 1793 to 1795 an early metric system used bar for a unit of mass equal to the modern tonne. The pressure bar was introduced by the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes, a founder of modern weather forecasting, who defined it as one megadyne per square centimeter. Some earlier writers had used bar for one dyne per square centimeter, a source of confusion.
The bar is a metric unit but not part of the SI, and its official symbol is simply bar, since the old b clashes with the barn and the bit. It has been legally recognized in EU countries since 2004, although NIST deprecates it except for limited use in meteorology.
Its size is handy because 1 bar is slightly less than average sea-level pressure, which is about 1.013 bar. In scuba diving every 10 meters of seawater adds about 1 bar and a full standard tank holds about 200 bar. Tire pressure and turbocharger boost are often quoted in bar outside the US.
1 bar = 100,000 pascals (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Bar (unit); Wikipedia: Atmospheric pressure
Related conversions
- Bars to pounds per square foot (reverse)
- Pounds per square foot to pascals
- Pounds per square foot to kilopascals
- Pounds per square foot to standard atmospheres
- Pounds per square foot to PSI
- Pascals to bars
- Kilopascals to bars
- Standard atmospheres to bars
- PSI to bars
- Hectopascals to bars
- Megapascals to bars
- Millibars to bars
- Torr to bars
- Millimeters of mercury to bars
- Inches of mercury to bars
- Gigapascals to bars
- Kilopounds per square inch to bars
See all pressure units.