How are weight limits on chairs and other things tested?
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By putting weights onto them.
For instance elevators need certain safety margins. You roughly know using mathematic formulas and such (simulations for instance.. don’t even need to do it IRL) how much that elevator wire and the chair leg can theoretically hold… material science, we know how certain materials behave in terms of load limits etc. We know when certain materials snap at xyz diameter.. how? We tried it… there is big data sheets for mostly any material you could ask for which one can put quite reliably into formulas and simulate stuff.
Then you just put weight on it to proove this hypothesis..again can be done virtually.
Then you take a good bit off that to be on the safe side.
Same goes for airport runways. Most planes can easily land on way less of a runway but we give extra safety margins just in case unlikely cases can happen.. this is quite a tangent but part of why the airbus a380 was inconvenient.. the thing was so large it regulary would need longer runways or less fuel to land safety according to regulations. Globally.. so it ever only flew to airports that can hold it safely….which limited it’s usefulness massively….not that it cannot do Land there given a pilot knows the machine…but we ultimately don’t wanna go beyond safety limits.
Ofc for the chair it is as simple as: the wood may not be as sturdy. After all we use averages. In 2 million chair legs there can be a flimsy one etc… for the plane it may be overshooting that runway.. for the elevator it is the cable snapping.
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