modules

Engineers must design structures that balance many competing demands. Our structures must be cost effective, sustainable and above all safe. These demands require engineers to employ a range of analytical and modelling skills. This module focuses on developing your understanding and knowledge of two distinct topics; strut buckling and structural dynamics. An understanding of the mechanics associated with each will equip you with the ability to perform complex structural analyses that allow you to design efficient and safe structures.

Buckling is a highly non-linear structural behaviour that, if not adequately understood and accounted for can lead to sudden catastrophic collapse. In this module we will develop your understanding of buckling from first principles, developing the governing equations that allow you to model and predict buckling failure. We will also explore how to modify our strict mathematical descriptions to account for real world imperfections that significantly impact the behaviour of columns and structs under compression loading.

In an ideal world, we might like all structures to be static. Our analyses would be greatly simplified if we could make the assumption that a single value of force induced a single value of displacement. However, in reality, we need to be aware of the potentially massive impact inertia has on the behaviour of the structures we design. In the second half of the module we’ll develop a solid grounding in structural dynamics and come to realise that static analysis are simply a subset of dynamic analyses. We will explore, both single degree of freedom and multi-degree of freedom system and equip you with the tools to analyses and model the behaviour of both.

Prerequisite module: ECM1202 Basic Mechanics or equivalent

_{Please note that all modules are subject to change, please get in touch if you have any questions about this module.}