In civil engineering, what exactly is the "k" load unit?

Question

examples:
"the side girders have a weight of 0.5 k/ft"
"the load imposed by a train is 7.2 k/ft"

is k equal to kN? my text doesn't properly define "k" for the uninitiated...

Answer 1

A k stands for kip, which means 1,000 pounds. 7.2k/ft means 7,000 pounds per foot load.

It wouldn't be Newton per foot, as the units wouldn't be mixed.

Answer 2

its a bit of a mis-mash.

To Calculate the dead load of girder.

DCgirder = Ag(γgirder)
where:
Ag = beam cross-sectional area (in2) = 1,085 in2
γ = unit weight of beam concrete (kcf) = 0.150 kcf

DCgirder (I) = (1,085/144)(0.150) = 1.13 k/ft/girder

But the Imperial system is beng used to denote a SI term...

kilofoot
In the United States, late 20th – early 21st centuries, a unit of length, = 1000 feet = 304.8 meters. It is used in telecommunications to describe telephone line lengths, and in aeronautics and meteorology to describe altitudes. Symbol, kft, or more rarely Kft. The latter spelling seems to occur only in telecommunications documents, and in those mainly in contexts where the similarly misspelled symbol Kbps (kilobits per second) also occurs. (By SI usage rules, the “k” for kilo- should not be capitalized.)

The RAND style manual (pages 43-44) condemns the kilofoot on the grounds that it is a hybrid of two disparate systems of units, which is undeniable, but the objection sounds a lot like the nineteenth-century objections to various metric units because the root was Greek and the prefix Latin or vice versa. The fact is the kilofoot is a standard unit in certain fields.

This is where the confusion starts, because it is also the abbreviation for kip/foot, 1 kN/m = 14.593 k/ft in Distributed Load.

In the United States, a kip is sometimes a unit of weight that equals 1,000 avoirdupois pounds (used to compute shipping charges), or more often a unit of force that equals 1,000 pounds force (used to measure engineering loads). Its symbol is kip. The name comes from combining the words "kilo" and "pound", thus 1,000 pounds; it is called a kilopound, sometimes using the same symbol kip or sometimes klb.

The kip is mainly used by architects and structural engineers. As a unit of force it is sometimes called the kip-force (symbol kipf or klbf) to distinguish it from the unit of mass.

The kip was also the name of obsolete units of measure in England and Malaysia.

Answer 3

A thousand.