Following on from what James said....
It's really the same with any engineering. Whilst we can attempt to calculate what we expect to be the failure point of a given component under a certain set of circumstance; it can never be 100% exact for a variety of reasons. There will always be a degree of uncertainty.
Therefore, we always build things with a margin of safety built in. How big that margin is will depend on the confidence that we have in the ability to manufacture within certain tolerances and the intended role of whatever it is that we are building. For example....Components for F1 cars are built to tolerances that would be uneconomic for a production cars and are built with much smaller safety margins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety
The only way to be sure is effectively to test the component to failure/destruction...But that doesn't necessarily mean that the next one off the line will be the same.
It's really the same with any engineering. Whilst we can attempt to calculate what we expect to be the failure point of a given component under a certain set of circumstance; it can never be 100% exact for a variety of reasons. There will always be a degree of uncertainty.
Therefore, we always build things with a margin of safety built in. How big that margin is will depend on the confidence that we have in the ability to manufacture within certain tolerances and the intended role of whatever it is that we are building. For example....Components for F1 cars are built to tolerances that would be uneconomic for a production cars and are built with much smaller safety margins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_of_safety
The only way to be sure is effectively to test the component to failure/destruction...But that doesn't necessarily mean that the next one off the line will be the same.
Statistics: Posted by kip_the_elder — Sun Mar 10, 2024 9:25 am