Whats the most unique engineering unit you've encountered? 5

[JGard1985]

For fun, what is the most unique engineering unit you've encountered in your years?

Some considerations:
[ul]
[li]Name[/li]
[li]Units that mixing and matching english and metric[/li]
[li]Usefulness & practicality[/li]
[/ul]

My two first nominations:
[ul]
[li]KW/foot: A mix & match of english & metric, its used in the commercial nuclear power industry. The unit is a of measure of the amount of energy produced in metric, per linear foot of fuel rod. The calculation is important for evaluating the heat transfer capacity to the water in the reactor. Too much energy will result in fuel clad damage, compromising the integrity of the first fission barrier [/li]
[li]slinch: The slinch is an english unit of mass equal to 1 lbf*sec^2/in. (Think Weight divided by 386.6in/sec^2) In my opinion it has almost no practical application except for use in the mass input for english-unit based Finite Element Models.[/li]
[/ul]

Excited to hear your nominees

Jeff
Pipe Stress Analysis
Finite Element Analysis

http://www.xceed-eng.com

 

[dik]

I did some work about 50 years ago, on teeth, and the measurements were in microns, and the data had to be reviewed statistically to determine if it was from the same 'family'. Unique enough?

 

[IRstuff]

I don't think I have anything quite that colorful.

My AP physics teacher (1975-ish) was very fond of furlongs per fortnight. Much to my delight, Mathcad 15 has both furlong and fortnight as built-in units, so it's 166.3095 microns/second

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

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[JohnRBaker]

While I never found an actual engineering use for it, when I used to do CAD demos and people would ask what sort of units were supported when creating parametric formulas, my favorite example would include something that involved a Velocity valued in 'Furlongs/Fortnight' ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[IRstuff]

There is the smoot, which was used to measure the 364.4 smoot length of Harvard Bridge.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list

http://www.eng-tips.com/forumlist.cfm

 

[dik]

6.548x10^(-3) in/sec... interesting... I had no idea it was so small...

Smoot is good... approx 1.7018 m... cubit, anyone?

Dik

 

[CWB1]

My brother the programmer mentioned once that he uses some rather interesting and unusual units at times as one simple method to protect his work from corporate thievery, I never knew until then the origin of the Google name in googol.

 

[jari001]

A (Carl) Sagan is defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number of anything. I first saw it in the editorial section of an astronomy zine that was talking about the number of stars in the observable Universe. Have yet to use it, but I think I can use it in conjunction with Avogadro's number if I ever wanted to give a tech reviewer a hard time

 

[cranky108]

CWB1 No wonder we missed mars.

Jar, a Sagan is billions of billions of anything.

Has anyone used the term Kilo dollars, drives the book keepers nuts.

 

[dik]

That and kilobucks and megabucks...

Dik

 

[Sparweb]

While I never had the nerve to hand in an assignment with this on it, I used to confuse my classmates while doing homework problems together by writing the units of bending moment as:
Newton-kilometers

Their reaction to this unit turned out to be an accurate way to predict their final grade in Statics and Mechanics of Materials classes.

STF

 

[zeusfaber]

Jar, a Sagan is billions of.....

I had to read that two or three times before I realised you were addressing a person called Jar, rather than nominating the Jar (=1111 picofarads) as an incongruous unit.

A.

 

[drawoh]

JGard1985,

An old colleague of mine tried to introduce the term SNAK. A SNAK was two bytes of data, as opposed to the Word, which is dependent on architecture.

It did not catch on, as you may have noticed.

--
JHG

 

[SlideRuleEra]

An unusual one: "Grace Hopper Nanosecond"
A unit that combines length with time. When early computer authority Grace Hopper began a talk she would pass out pieces of wire about one foot long... the distance electricity will travel in one nanosecond (1 x 10[sup]-9[/sup] seconds).

Useful: "Acre-Foot"
A unit of volume. An area of one acre that is one foot deep. (43,560 cubic feet). Often used as a measurement of the volume of a body of water, such as a detention pond.

http://www.SlideRuleEra.net

http://www.VacuumTubeEra.net

 

[dik]

Used to use acre-foot for pondage for hydro electric development and size of reservoir and height of dam calculations.

Dik

 

[dik]

From work in quantum physics of nearly 50 years ago... a Barn = 10^(-24) cm^2

from wiki,
"...secretive unit to describe the approximate cross sectional area presented by the typical nucleus (10−28 m2) and decided on "barn." This was particularly applicable because they considered this a large target for particle accelerators that needed to have direct strikes on nuclei and the American idiom "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn."

 

[JohnRBaker]

With respect to the so-called "Grace Hopper Nanosecond", there's more to the story. In addition to the individual pieces of wire, each representing the distance that an electron travels in a nanosecond, that she handed out to the people attending her seminars, she also had in her own hand a large coil of wire which represented the distance that an electron traveled in a millisecond. She used these two example lengths of wire to make the point that when programming a computer, being willing to accept an operation that took a millisecond versus working harder to get something to compute in only a few nanoseconds makes a really big difference.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[hokie66]

Not sure if it is an engineering unit, but "blibbit" comes to mind when reading this thread.

 

[berkshire]

John Baker,
At one time I had a VHS video tape of Grace Hopper doing that lecture , handing out the pieces of wire and explaining their significance. She also had iddy bitty pieces of wire for higher frequencies.
B.E.

You are judged not by what you know, but by what you can do.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Here's a segment of that Grace Hopper 'Nanosecond' lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without