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Pressure

Bar to pascals

1 bar = 100 000 Pa

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One bar is exactly 100,000 pascals. The round number is the whole reason the bar exists: the pascal is too small to be convenient for most real pressures, and multiplying by a hundred thousand is easier than remembering an arbitrary constant.

About the units

The pascal is the SI derived unit of pressure, defined as one newton per square metre, and named after Blaise Pascal, whose experiments in the 1640s established that atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude. It is a very small unit in human terms: a sheet of paper resting on a table exerts about one pascal. Atmospheric pressure is 101,325 Pa, a car tyre around 250,000 Pa, and a diving cylinder 20,000,000 Pa. The bar was created to make those numbers manageable without abandoning the metric system, and although SI discourages it, it is entrenched in engineering, meteorology and diving.

The exact factor

The factor is exactly 100,000, or 10⁵. The prefixed forms line up neatly as a result: 1 bar = 100 kPa = 0.1 MPa, and 1 millibar = 100 Pa = 1 hectopascal. That last identity is why meteorologists could switch from millibars to hectopascals in the 1980s without changing a single number on a weather chart. For very low pressures the microbar appears in acoustics, equal to 0.1 Pa, and it is the reference against which older sound pressure levels were quoted.

Where you meet this conversion

Engineering documentation that must be SI-compliant states pressures in pascals or their prefixed forms while the equipment itself is marked in bar, so the conversion appears in nearly every specification review. Finite element analysis and fluid dynamics software works in pascals internally. Building services, ventilation and cleanroom differential pressures are quoted in pascals because the quantities are genuinely small — a cleanroom might be held 15 Pa above ambient.

Common values

Value (bar) Converted (Pa)
1 100 000
2 200 000
5 500 000
10 1 000 000
25 2 500 000
50 5 000 000
100 10 000 000
500 50 000 000
1 000 100 000 000

Values are rounded for reading. The converter above keeps full precision.

The other way around

1 Pa = 1.0000 × 10^-5 bar

Pascals to bar divides by 100,000. Shifting five decimal places is the whole operation, and the useful intermediate step is the kilopascal, since 100 kPa is one bar and most engineering numbers sit comfortably in that range.

Value (Pa) Converted (bar)
1 1.0000 × 10^-5
2 2.0000 × 10^-5
5 5.0000 × 10^-5
10 0.0001
25 0.00025
50 0.0005
100 0.001
500 0.005
1 000 0.01

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