I can’t seem to wrap my head around the term pressure.
Vehicle tyres use air pressure, toilets faucets etc use pressure (presumably water pressure),
pressing onto something applies pressure, our blood has pressure, temperature is also affected by “pressure”.
I know there are various types of pressure, and I can’t think of any more examples at the moment, but my point is “pressure” sounds like a very arbitrary or vague umbrella term to me.
Help me make sense of it?
In: 3
Intuitively, pressure is a measure of how much the particles in a liquid or gas (or even a solid sometimes) are pushing on their neighbors because of crowdedness. Particles can be crowded because there’s a lot of them packed into a tight space, or because they’re hot so they want to take up more space, or both.
Numerically, pressure is measured by asking how many units of force it pushes with, per unit of surface area. One common pressure unit is PSI, or “pounds per square inch.” If you inflate your bike tire to 50 psi, that means that each square-inch of rubber in the tire, is receiving 50 pounds of outward force from the air inside it.
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