UNITS

• Most of you will be familiar with SI Units: metres, litres and Newtons
• However, given the extent of the Engineering Industry, you will have to
become familiar with US Customary Units and Imperial units as well or at
least be able to convert between them.
• This is something even NASA gets wrong!

In 1998 the Mars Climate Orbiter reached Mars and

was designed to orbit the planet and collect weather
data. The Lockheed Martin engineers were using
Feet and the NASA engineers were using metres…
[Online]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/past/marsclimateorbiter.ht
ml[Accessed 14/1/2003]
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 UNITS cont’d
US SI

Force lb 4.4482N

Mass slug 14.5938kg

Length ft 0.3048m

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 UNITS: Example
Convert 300lbs to SI Units
N
300lb  4.482   1344.6
 lb 
Convert 52 slug/ft3 to SI units:

 slug   slug   kg  1  ft  3
52 3   52 3   14.593   (   
 ft   ft   slug  0.3048  m 
kg
 26800 3 (26799.5)
m
3
 UNITS cont’d
• The other important thing with units is that you must
learn to check homogeneity of units or consistency:
x=vt + 0.5at2

metres  m 2
metres   sec s  0.5 2  sec 
sec s  sec 
ft  ft 2
feet   sec s  0.5 2  sec 
sec s  sec 

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 SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
• Relates to the precision of a measurement: any figure
besides a zero indication of a decimal place is a significant
figure
• 26798 has five significant figures
• 0.26798 has five significant figures
• 0.267980 has six significant figures
• In the last example we must be confident that the
measurements can be accurate enough to the sixth decimal
place

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 SIGNIFICANT FIGURES CONT’D
• Usually in engineering we quote numbers to 2 or 3 significant
figures. This means in calculation you need to use one extra
place and then round off at the end.

• Scientific notation is also useful to specify the number of

significant figures:
• How many sig figs does 40 have?
• Better to specify as 4x101 or 4.0x101

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 Rounding
• 2.326 to 2 significant figures is…
• 2.351 to 2 significant figures is…
• 2.391 to 2 significant figures is…

• When doing arithmetic operations, use the least number of significant figures of any of the quantities involved and
remember to round:

2.96345 + 1 = 4

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 Prefixes
• Engineers typically work in multiples of 1000
109 Giga (G)
106 Mega (M)
103 Kilo (k)
10-3 Milli (m)
10-6 Micro ()
10-9 Nano (n)