eli5, Why do people refer to bite strength in PSI ?

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So I was looking at another answer and it indicated that polar bears have a bite of 1200PSI.
This seems crazy, even a small force crushing something between the edges of two teeth would generate a huge PSI value.

Why do they use PSI, shouldn’t it be lbs-force (well OK it should be newtons, but that’s another issue)?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Indeed it should be lb force. It’s referred to as PSI incorrectly for similar reasons that people use lbf and lbm interchangeably. Almost no one giving these numbers out cites their sources either.

If you see PSI for bite force probably just assume it means lbf that they can apply to an actual single square inch of material.

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