What's the greatest mechanical force we can achieve?

[kieyard]

hello everybody,

just doing some general designing and was wondering what is the greatest mechanical force we can achieve already, in the form of a piston or a press. i am not to sure how, just want to know the value and how its achieved.

 

[DEvens]

Probably diamond-anvil press used for studying high pressure physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell

These have been used to study pressures up to 6 million atmospheres. Of course, it is in a very small sample. But the cool thing is, since the anvil is a diamond, you can do spectroscopy through the anvil into the sample.

It's pretty cool why I know about this. That's really me in my avatar picture, standing in front of a fusion research device. No I didn't work on the project, not directly. But work on a contract related to it got me a tour, hence a selfie.

So this project needs to know about the equation of state of materials up to rather high pressures. And so I was able to look up, and refer them to, the book _High-Pressure Physics_ by John Loveday.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1439814287/?tag=pfamazon01-20

That book describes a lot about this subject.