pdl
poundal
Forceexact by definition
The poundal is the force that accelerates one pound of mass at one foot per second squared, exactly 0.138254954376 newtons. It is the mirror image of the slug: where the slug keeps the pound-force and fixes the mass unit, the poundal keeps the pound-mass and fixes the force unit.
Watch out: A poundal is tiny, about 1/32 of a pound-force, which is the tell that you are reading a foot-pound-second text and not an engineering one. Poundal-based and slug-based numbers cannot be mixed in the same equation.
| 1 pdl | 0.13825495 N |
Where the unit came from
Introduced in the 1870s in the absolute foot-pound-second system, and taught in British physics for most of the twentieth century before SI displaced it.
Solvers that use force