Every edifice cloth has a theoretical demarcation which it ca n’t be used beyond : at some dot , the system of weights of material above is enough to crush what ’s below . Now , a squad of engine driver has worked out that bound for Lego — and it ’s amazingly high .
A squad of research worker from the Open University in the UK decided to settle speculation — includingburning debates on Reddit — bytackling the question scientifically . Asthe BBC report , here ’s how they did it .
Under pressure
To work out how high a tower can be before it jam itself , you need to know two thing : the mass of material , and its yield military strength . The yield strength trace how much lade a material can take before it begins to deform .
To work that out , you ask a fancy machine called a hydraulic examination machine . So , the engineers withdraw their test specimen — a 2×2 Lego brick — and place it into machine . Then they ratchet it up until thing started getting interesting . They sailed past 770 pound and wondered if they were doing something improper . Eventually , the payload reached 950 pounds and the brick began to slowly twist — which is know as plastic nonstarter .
It ’s not gaudy , it ’s not dramatic , but it was decidedly the ending of the lego brick , as you could see in the picture : it ’s squashed altogether flat . Repeat experiments confirmed that the average 2×2 brick , each of which ismade of ABS plastic in Lego ’s factories , can take 950 pound .
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-look-inside-the-lego-factory-5022769
Do the math
Once you know how much adulterate a brick can take , then working out how tall you’re able to build up a column is fairly easy . A normal 2×2 Lego brick count just 1.152 g. From that , you may work out out how many you involve to produce the thumping 950 pounds that the brick at the bottom of a tower could take .
To preserve you jumping for a reckoner , turns out that fig is 375,000 bricks . You could pile 375,000 2×2 bricks on top of each other before the one at the bottom was crushed like in the experiment . Multiply that routine by the summit of the brick — which is 9.6 millimeter — and you realize that you could , theoretically , create a tug 2.17 miles high before anything went awry .
It ’s also deserving yield in mind that clever Lego builder have a cluster of technique at thier electric pig tocreate taller tower by minimizing mass , and the researchers even conceive that 1×2 bricks would belike stand firm more . So in theory , an even taller tower could be made .
https://gizmodo.com/worlds-tallest-lego-tower-rises-over-toronto-292730
That is , however , all possibility . In world , crafting a 2 mile - improbable tower would be almost impossible : in real life sentence , the freight would n’t be perfectly adequate or symmetric , so a lilliputian fault in the structure would be massively amplified . Sorry . [ BBC ]
Image by BBC , Open University andSami Niemelä
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