Introduction to the Mechanics of Solids

The pictures of the design competition

2006-05-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Some pictures of the design competition is available online:
Link

What is Applied Mechanics?

2006-04-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

A wikibook on solid mechanics

2006-03-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

This wikibook is incomplete, but it's free and anybody can edit it.

Plot shear force and bending moment diagrams

2006-03-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

Below is the link to a neat Java application that plots shear force and bending moment diagrams for a given set of beams and various loading conditions.

http://www.engapplets.vt.edu/statics/BeamView/BeamView.html

Best,
Harsha

Fun Mini-FEA program

2006-03-01T06:30:00.000-08:00

There is a really cool Mini-FEA program on the web developed by Prof. Paul Steiff at CMU for analyzing beams. It's very simple - all you have to do is enter the size of your beam, its material properties, and specify the loading - and then you can instantly see the deformed shape of your beam and output stresses in the beam.

Mini-FEA program:
http://engineering-education.com/miniFEA/

The program was developed for Windows PCs and can be run in Internet Explorer or Firefox. I've tried running it on my Mac, and if you're patient with it, you can run it on a Mac with Firefox.

The tutorial for the miniFEA program is very instructive and short. Try it out!

A place for useful and interesting stuff

2006-02-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

Our teaching fellows have been telling me about interesting tools for learning solid mechanics. We'll archive them here. Anyone can participate in this effort by leaving comments below each post.