This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. In particular, It's not clear at the end if specific force is proper acceleration or not. There's another Wikipedia article talking about proper acceleration. (March 2017) |
Specific force (SF) is a mass-specific quantity defined as the quotient of force per unit mass.
It is a physical quantity of kind acceleration, with dimension of length per time squared and units of metre per second squared (m·s−2).
It is normally applied to forces other than gravity, to emulate the relationship between gravitational acceleration and gravitational force. It can also be called mass-specific weight (weight per unit mass), as the weight of an object is equal to the magnitude of the gravity force acting on it.
The g-force is an instance of specific force measured in units of the standard gravity (g) instead of m/s², i.e., in multiples of g (e.g., "3 g").