| Decapascals (daPa) | Terapascals (TPa) |
|---|---|
| 1 Decapascal | 1 × 10-11 TPa |
| 2 Decapascals | 2 × 10-11 TPa |
| 3 Decapascals | 3 × 10-11 TPa |
| 4 Decapascals | 4 × 10-11 TPa |
| 5 Decapascals | 5 × 10-11 TPa |
| 10 Decapascals | 1 × 10-10 TPa |
| 20 Decapascals | 2 × 10-10 TPa |
| 25 Decapascals | 2.5 × 10-10 TPa |
| 50 Decapascals | 5 × 10-10 TPa |
| 100 Decapascals | 0.000000001 TPa |
| Reference | Decapascals (daPa) | Terapascals (TPa) |
|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric pressure at sea level | 10132.5 daPa | 0.000000101325 TPa |
| Healthy blood pressure (120 mmHg) | 1600 daPa | 0.000000016 TPa |
| A car tyre | 22000 daPa | 0.00000022 TPa |
| A racing bicycle tyre | 60000 daPa | 0.0000006 TPa |
The decapascal is a unit of pressure equal to ten pascals. Its symbol is daPa. Deca is the least used prefix in the metric system almost everywhere, but the decapascal is an exception, because one clinical discipline adopted it and has kept it: audiology measures the pressure inside the middle ear in decapascals.
Tympanometry is the test in question. A probe seals the ear canal and varies the air pressure in it while measuring how much sound the eardrum reflects, and the resulting curve is plotted against pressure in decapascals. The sweep runs from about plus 200 to minus 400, and the position of the peak shows the pressure at which the eardrum moves most freely, which is normally the pressure of the middle ear itself.
That single graph carries a great deal of clinical information. A peak near zero means the middle ear is at the same pressure as the room, which is the healthy state. A peak displaced towards minus 200 or beyond suggests the Eustachian tube is not equalising properly, and a flat curve with no peak at all suggests fluid behind the eardrum. Each of those readings is a position on a decapascal scale.
The unit was chosen for the same reason the hectopascal was chosen in meteorology. Middle-ear pressure had long been recorded in millimetres of water, and one millimetre of water is 0.98 decapascals, so switching to the metric unit left every clinical number and every published reference range almost unchanged. A change of unit that shifts the figures by two per cent is one that practitioners will actually accept.
Outside audiology the decapascal is essentially unused. Ventilation and building airtightness work at similar pressures, an airtightness test being run at fifty pascals, but those figures are written in pascals, and everything above them moves to hectopascals or kilopascals. The gap between one and a hundred pascals is otherwise unclaimed.
For scale, ten pascals is the pressure a light breeze exerts on a wall, or the difference between the two ends of a well-sealed corridor when a door opens. It is also roughly the pressure change from riding a lift up one floor, which is why ears sometimes need clearing in a tall building.
One decapascal equals 10 pascals, 0.1 hectopascals, about 1.02 millimetres of water, or about 0.00145 pounds per square inch.
The terapascal is a unit of pressure equal to a thousand gigapascals, written TPa. It is ten million bar. Nothing built by engineers operates at this pressure, and the unit belongs instead to two quite separate corners of science: the stiffness of the strongest materials known, and the interiors of large planets.
Carbon nanostructures put it on the map. A single-walled carbon nanotube has a Young's modulus close to one terapascal, and a sheet of graphene the same, which makes them the stiffest materials ever measured relative to their weight. Diamond, long the benchmark, comes in at 1.2 terapascals. Those three numbers are the reason the unit appears at all in materials science.
Stiffness at this level is not the same as strength. A nanotube resists stretching enormously, but a real fibre made of many of them fails at a far lower stress because the tubes slide past one another. Confusing a terapascal modulus with a terapascal breaking strength is one of the commonest errors in popular accounts of these materials.
Planetary interiors reach genuine terapascal pressures. The centre of Jupiter is estimated at three to four terapascals, and the cores of larger gas giants beyond that. Under such conditions hydrogen behaves as a metal, which is what generates the planet's magnetic field, so the unit describes a state of matter rather than a load on a structure.
Laboratories can now reach it briefly. Laser-driven shock compression and pulsed magnetic techniques drive samples into the terapascal range for nanoseconds at a time, long enough to record how a material's density and structure respond. Those experiments are the only direct evidence available about matter under the conditions inside giant planets.
For scale, one terapascal is ten million times atmospheric pressure and about a thousand times the pressure at the centre of the earth divided by three. The number stops being something a person can feel and becomes a description of what atoms do when they are pushed close enough together to change their chemistry.
One terapascal equals 1,000,000,000,000 pascals, 1000 gigapascals, 10,000,000 bar, or about 145 million pounds per square inch.