• Question: how strong is the steel that you make for vehicles and has it ever failed

    Asked by 223tntd28 to Bernard on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Bernard Ennis

      Bernard Ennis answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      The steel I make has a tensile strength of around 800 million Newtons per square metre (for short we use the notation MPa, where M is millions). This probably doesn’t mean very much, but it would take around 8 tons to pull apart a piece of this steel which was the same width as one of the hairs on your head (around 1 square mm).

      All materials fail if you put enough load on them, so the trick is knowing how much load you can put on it before it breaks.

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