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L. Use of the Terms "Mass" and "Weight" [See Section K. NOTE] When used in this handbook, the term "weight" means "mass". The term "weight" appears when inch-pound units are cited, or when both inch-pound and SI units are included in a requirement. The terms "mass" or "masses" are used when only SI units are cited in a requirement.
In United States customary units, the pound can be either a unit of force or a unit of mass. [24] Related units used in some distinct, separate subsystems of units include the poundal and the slug. The poundal is defined as the force necessary to accelerate an object of one-pound mass at 1 ft/s 2, and is equivalent to about 1/32.2 of a pound-force.
The SI unit of force is the newton (symbol N), which is the force required to accelerate a one kilogram mass at a rate of one meter per second squared, or kg·m·s −2.The corresponding CGS unit is the dyne, the force required to accelerate a one gram mass by one centimeter per second squared, or g·cm·s −2. A newton is thus equal to ...
If a first body of mass m A is placed at a distance r (center of mass to center of mass) from a second body of mass m B, each body is subject to an attractive force F g = Gm A m B /r 2, where G = 6.67 × 10 −11 N⋅kg −2 ⋅m 2 is the "universal gravitational constant". This is sometimes referred to as gravitational mass.
Stresses and strains are of no interest but rotational effects are. A force arrow should lie along the line of force, but where along the line is irrelevant. A force on an extended rigid body is a sliding vector. non-rigid extended. The point of application of a force becomes crucial and has to be indicated on the diagram.
A body force is simply a type of force, and so it has the same dimensions as force, [M][L][T] −2. However, it is often convenient to talk about a body force in terms of either the force per unit volume or the force per unit mass. If the force per unit volume is of interest, it is referred to as the force density throughout the system.
Thus, the force between two particles is actually the average of a very large number of atomic forces between their molecules; and physical quantities like mass, velocity, and forces that act through the bulk of three-dimensional bodies, like gravity, are assumed to be smoothly distributed over them.
Together with the fact that the term "weight" is used for the gravitational force in some technical contexts (physics, engineering) and for mass in others (commerce, law), [10] and that the distinction often does not matter in practice, the coexistence of variants of the FPS system causes confusion over the nature of the unit "pound".