While the underlying equations governing structural mechanics may be complex, they can be made much more manageable with a few simplifying assumptions. Most introductory "mechanics of materials"...
Category: Engineering Mechanics
Most standard steel structural shapes these days are designed to prevent local buckling, as it's a tricky little check that's easy to miss, and these shapes are known as compact. Compact shapes...
Driveways, roads, sidewalks, airport runways, piers and jetties for heavy shipping, and buildings area all made of it. Civil engineering students even have competitions where they race canoes made...
The Centroid of a section (or Center of Gravity if we assume a uniform density section) is the intersection of its neutral axes. Under bending in any arbitrary direction across the section, this is...
Many tables and charts exist to help us find the moment of inertia of a shape about its own centroid, usually in both x- & y-axes, but only for simple shapes. How can we use those simple shapes...
As any good student of mechanics knows, we get the best stiffness from a given amount of material by flinging it far away from the neutral axis, which is why I-beams, T-beams, and box beams are so...