Below is a specifications of this magnetic relay:
For AC and DC the max switching current is given same as 10A. On the other hand, max switching voltage for DC is drastically lower than its AC counterpart as 40V and 240V respectively.
Now here is my confusion. For instance, let's say we apply 1V DC across a 1 Ohm resistor and the power becomes 1 Watt. Now if we want to apply AC voltage across this 1 Ohm resistor and we want to obtain again 1W it means we should apply AC 1V rms voltage across the resistor. This means in this case max AC becomes sqrt(2) V. So for the same power dissipation the instantaneous AC voltage can be sqrt(2) times higher than max DC.
But in the relay example it is not that simple. Why is the difference in max AC and DC voltages not close to sqrt(2) but much greater?