| Megapounds per square inch (Mpsi) | Millipascals (mPa) |
|---|---|
| 1 Megapound per square inch | 6894757000000 mPa |
| 2 Megapounds per square inch | 13789514000000 mPa |
| 3 Megapounds per square inch | 20684271000000 mPa |
| 4 Megapounds per square inch | 27579028000000 mPa |
| 5 Megapounds per square inch | 34473785000000 mPa |
| 10 Megapounds per square inch | 68947570000000 mPa |
| 20 Megapounds per square inch | 137895140000000 mPa |
| 25 Megapounds per square inch | 172368925000000 mPa |
| 50 Megapounds per square inch | 344737850000000 mPa |
| 100 Megapounds per square inch | 689475700000000 mPa |
| Reference | Megapounds per square inch (Mpsi) | Millipascals (mPa) |
|---|---|---|
| Atmospheric pressure at sea level | 0.0000146959 Mpsi | 101325000 mPa |
| Healthy blood pressure (120 mmHg) | 0.0000023206 Mpsi | 16000000 mPa |
| A car tyre | 0.0000319083 Mpsi | 220000000 mPa |
| A racing bicycle tyre | 0.0000870226 Mpsi | 600000000 mPa |
The megapound per square inch is a unit of pressure equal to one million pounds per square inch, or 6.895 gigapascals. Its symbol is Mpsi. Nothing operates at this pressure; the unit exists solely to state elastic modulus, which is the quantity that describes how stiff a material is rather than how strong.
Two numbers in it are memorised by every American mechanical engineer. Steel has a Young's modulus of 29 million pounds per square inch and aluminium of 10 million, and that ratio of roughly three to one governs how the two behave in every structure. A steel part and an aluminium part of identical shape and identical strength will not deflect identically, and the difference is exactly that factor.
The rest of the common metals fill in around them. Titanium sits at about 16.5 million pounds per square inch, copper at 17, magnesium at 6.5, and cast iron between 12 and 20 depending on grade. Because modulus barely changes with heat treatment or alloying within a metal family, these figures are far more stable than strength figures and can be relied on across grades.
Composites are where the unit does its most interesting work. Standard carbon fibre reaches about 33 million pounds per square inch along the fibre, high-modulus grades 55 to 85, and glass fibre only about 10, the same as aluminium. Since a composite laminate has a different modulus in every direction, designers work with a set of values rather than one, and the unit appears many times on a single datasheet.
Its metric equivalent is the gigapascal, and the conversion is 6.895 gigapascals to the megapound per square inch. Steel at 29 million pounds per square inch is 200 gigapascals, and aluminium at 10 million is 69, which are the two most quoted stiffness figures in metric engineering as well. The two traditions are describing exactly the same materials.
Distinguishing modulus from strength matters more here than anywhere. A steel with a modulus of 29 million pounds per square inch might yield at 50 thousand, a difference of nearly six hundred times, and the two properties are independent: heat treatment can double the strength of a steel while leaving its stiffness untouched.
One megapound per square inch equals 1,000,000 pounds per square inch, about 6.895 gigapascals, about 68,950 bar, or 1000 kilopounds per square inch.
The millipascal is a unit of pressure equal to one thousandth of a pascal. Its symbol is mPa. The pascal is already a very small unit — it is the pressure of a sheet of paper lying on a table — so a thousandth of one is smaller than almost any pressure a person encounters. It survives because two fields genuinely work at that scale: acoustics and viscosity.
Sound is a pressure wave, and the pressures involved are tiny. Ordinary conversation at a metre carries a sound pressure of about 20 millipascals. A whisper is nearer 2, and the threshold of hearing, the quietest sound a healthy young ear can detect, is 0.02 millipascals, which is 20 micropascals. A loud rock concert reaches a few pascals. The entire useful range of human hearing therefore lives between a hundredth of a millipascal and a few thousand of them.
That is why sound is reported in decibels rather than in pressure units. A range spanning a factor of a million is unwieldy in linear numbers, so acoustics takes the logarithm and anchors it at the threshold of hearing. But the decibel is not a unit of pressure at all: behind every decibel figure is a pressure in pascals or millipascals, and instrument calibration is done in those real units.
The second use is stranger, because it is not a pressure at all. Dynamic viscosity is measured in pascal seconds, and almost every liquid people care about lands in the millipascal second range. Water at room temperature is 1 mPa·s exactly enough for practical purposes. That happens to equal one centipoise in the older CGS system, so the switch to SI left every viscosity table numerically unchanged, which is why the millipascal second took hold where the millipascal alone did not.
With that scale in hand, the numbers become legible. Petrol is about 0.6 mPa·s, olive oil about 80, honey several thousand, and glycerol around 1,400. Blood plasma is about 1.3, and whole blood nearer 4, which is one reason blood flow is harder to model than water flow.
For pressure itself, outside acoustics, the millipascal appears in vacuum work and in the gentlest of laboratory measurements — the pressure differences that drive slow gas flow, or the residual pressure in a chamber that has been pumped down hard. In those settings the alternative units are the micropascal below and the pascal above.
One millipascal equals 0.001 pascals, one thousand micropascals, 0.00001 millibars, or about 0.000000145 pounds per square inch.