The engineer challenges the eternal mystery as to how high the LEGO stacks up

ByMatt Mets

It is LEGO that one can not be removed as one of the most popular toys all over the world, there are many people who made something with LEGO when they were children and played. How high can you stack up such a Lego?RedditBut on a topic of major discussion, BBC, the national broadcast of the UK,Open UniversityWe exchanged hands with the research team and conducted experiments and verified it.

BBC News - How tall can a Lego tower get?
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20578627

It is the research team led by Dr. Ian Johnston of the Open University Faculty of Engineering who seriously tackles the experiment of how much height a LEGO stacks up. Dr. Johnston carefully examined it on the Internet before the experiment, but many clear observations about the height of the limits at which LEGO could be accumulated, but no clear answer was obtained.

The problem with stacking LEGO is the durability of the lowest LEGO. By stacking up the LEGO, the load is applied to the bottom LEGO, and eventually it will collapse. In other words, if you examine the durability of Lego, you know the weight of the LEGO stacked and the number and height are known.

The research team set the 2 x 2 size LEGO into a hydraulic pressure machine and investigated how much pressure it could withstand. In the first experiment, LEGO did not collapse even when a force of 350 N (Newton) equivalent to a weight of 350 kg was applied. When it exceeds 4000 N, a phenomenon similar to 'melting' occurs rather than 'crush' on LEGO. This is a phenomenon of material destruction of plastics, that plastics can not keep shape regardless of the presence or absence of pressure.


Even after that, we performed several experiments and calculated the average pressure immediately before material failure occurred, it was about 4240 N equivalent to the weight of 432 kg. The weight of one 2 x 2 size LEGO is 1.152 g, so 432 kg is for LEGO 375 000 pieces. In other words, about 375,000 Legos were stacked on a 1 2 Lego size lego, and it turned out that the height was 3500 m.


Although it does not arrive to Mt. Fuji where the altitude is 3776 m, it is found that LEGO can be stacked up to a considerable height, Dr. Johnston said, "It turned out that LEGO could be piled up to a considerable height, but in fact 375 000 It is structurally impossible to pile up LEGO stuff. "

Based on the results of the experiment, I heard whether it is possible to accumulate 375,000 LEGOs in Que Duncan · Titmarshu, a professional certified professional LEGO, who has only 13 BBCs in the world. It is impossible to build up 4 m, but it is structurally impossible, but it is a very interesting theory. "

ByIanus

Although LEGO can theoretically be built up to a height of 3.5 Km, it is actually impossible. Although the word "reality is cruel" is the development as it is, this kind of experiment "I do not know what to do for" is tickle for some reason somehow.