Hydraulics rest on one line: F = P · A. Pressure pushing on an area produces a force. And by Pascal's principle, pressure applied to a confined fluid is the same everywhere in it — so a small piston and a large piston connected by fluid feel the same pressure but produce different forces. The bigger piston wins, in proportion to its area. That's a hydraulic press, a jack, a digger arm.
A pump makes 100 bar (10 MPa). Push it against a 50 mm bore piston — area 19.6 cm² — and you get 19.6 kN of force, about 2 tonnes. Feed the same pressure to a 150 mm piston (9× the area) and it pushes 9× harder: ~177 kN.
The catch is stroke: the big piston moves 9× less for the same fluid. Force up, distance down — energy is conserved, exactly like a lever.
A circle's area is π/4·d². Double the bore and you quadruple the area — and the force. It's
why a small increase in cylinder diameter buys a big jump in capacity.
1 bar ≈ 14.5 psi ≈ 0.1 MPa ≈ 100 kPa. Hydraulic systems often run 100–350 bar (roughly 1,500–5,000 psi). The tool converts as you switch units.
No. The output piston moves less in exact proportion to the force gain, so the work (force × distance) is the same on both sides, minus real-world losses. Hydraulics trade distance for force, like any machine.
On a cylinder's retract stroke the rod takes up part of the piston, so the working area is the annulus — bore minus rod — and the force is smaller. The tool now computes both. With a 100 mm bore and a 50 mm rod the annulus is 75% of the bore, so retract gives 75% of the force and, for the same pump flow, 133% of the speed. Force × speed is the same either way: a cylinder trades one for the other exactly and never creates power.
Because the fluid connecting them is incompressible — whatever volume the input piston displaces has to appear on the output side, instant for instant, not just at the end. Push the input piston at a steady speed and the output piston is forced to move at its own steady (much slower) speed the entire time, which is exactly why the animation has them arrive together rather than the small piston "getting there first."
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.