Foreword

This book is the result of a long held passion and belief that computation can empower and energize thinking and learning even in basic courses. I am hoping that all of you who use this book will confirm or disagree with this idea by dropping me a line at the email address at the end of this page.

The book took over five years to finish. It was mostly due to the many forks in the development.

Fork 1

It did not begin as a book. It started as a collection of MATLAB code that could accompany traditional instruction in basic engineering (Statics) and structural mechanics (Strength of Materials) courses. It essentially translated standard equilibrium and later structural analysis into code. The emphasis was not writing code but rather using MATLAB as a super calculator. The initial code had detailed explanation but subsequent development and extensions were just copy, paste, and edit with minor new features.

As a background for this effort “Statics” is usually the first engineering science course in most engineering curriculum. The traditional instruction is about introducing the concepts of equilibrium across different physical problem varieties and defining the physical quantities involved. Sadly you cannot design the structure in this course because that information is delivered through another course “Strength of Materials”. In many institutions this is a two course sequence. In other institutions it is a single course delivered in sequential fashion. The new information in the second course, which allows for design, is the introduction of stress and strain. This is a simple concept and does not require a significant amount of time to incorporate. Structural design is mostly analysis from Statics and finished with stress and displacement calculations from Strength of Materials.

Fork 2

In Fork 1 it became apparent that you could effortlessly do what if? analysis with this code - the essence of design. You could change the weight, or the length, or the diameter, and obtain the result without much sweat. You could also adapt the code easily to different problems with minor effort. In affecting this transition and making it work in code you have to pay attention to structural analysis. This is a powerful skill to learn in a basic course. In addition the ability to vary parameters of the problem allowed for development of design sensitivity right from the beginning provided it was utilized.

One might ask why not move the learning of stress and strain to “Statics” and then start talking about design from the start? This would actually perfectly merge the two courses and make it one.

I tried to develop content that did just this and started to extend problems in Statics to calculate stress, strain, and displacement so that it appeared a natural integration. This was easier to do than organizing the table of contents to deliver this information formally in the most useful manner. One constraint was that Statics was a freshman course and was calling upon mathematics principles that were being simultaneous introduced in a separate mathematics courses. Including structural design early meant including discussions of fracture early. Fracture even in the most simplest form is a challenging concept. Avoiding fracture is the goal of successful structural design. This took a long time to juggle and incorporate and I do not believe it is perfectly done here. It is a challenge and I am relying on the instructors to get the students through this with discussion and illustration. Its importance in design can be easily understood by the students, but the content necessary for analysis takes some time to learn and understand.

One effective way to understand the concepts was through graphics. MATLAB is a wonderful tool to explore engineering content graphically. Simple graphics are easy to generate in MATLAB. In addition, the classical formulation and solution of the engineering analysis was easily incorporated using symbolic calculations in MATLAB. It was similar to working out analysis on paper and following the same steps. The graphic confirmation of design solutions is also an effective way to understand and learn.

Fork 3

The efforts in Fork 2 extended the current work to include all topics in Strength of Materials. It naturally included the corresponding required topics in Statics. Suddenly, it started taking shape as a complete text book with an emphasis on design that was naturally incorporated. This led me to reflect on applied design.

Structural design in essence is choosing material or materials, determining loads the structure should support, and identifying dimensions that can withstand the loads without failure. In most text book situations the loads are generally known and the choice of material is usually based on experience and practice. The design challenge, particularly in instructional practice, is to select the dimensions of the structure so that it does not fail.

In traditional textbooks and instruction, cross-sectional properties based on dimensions of structures are often presented in Statics, where they are not used and relegated to the appendix in Strength of Materials, where they are necessary and important. In this book we avoid the appendix all together. The cross-sectional properties are introduced in the beginning as they are the essence of design. They also provide an avenue to become familiar with MATLAB code while using it numerically, symbolically, graphically, and sometimes textually.

Fork 4

This happened recently. In early 2019, the book felt bare with only examples and no additional practice problems. I started adding a few problems at the end of the sections.

Fork 5

In July 2019, I retired as an academic. I had always planned to release this book under Creative Commons license. I felt compelled to make the book truly useful under the new license. I resolved to provide support for Octave in this book. At least one MATLAB code in every section will have the Octave support and discuss the behavior of the code in Octave.

I am very comfortable with MATLAB and have been using it for more than a decade. The initial MATLAB code in the book was created using Version 2015a. All of the code in this book is verified with this version. I have not used Octave until now. I expected some learning delay. Since Octave accepts m-files I tried running the same MATLAB in Octave and to my surprise it worked. This made my task easier. I used the MATLAB code in Octave and debugged sufficiently to see that the code executed in Octave with the same results.

In this book, the text is written by me. The code is also original. Most of the figures used in the analysis are drawn by me. You will find some whimsical ones before I got more disciplined. There is a lot of color as it was planned as an e-book.

This is Version 1 of Essential Mechanics - Statics and Strength of Materials with MATLAB and Octave.

Technical Information involved in the development of the book:

The book was written in Scrivener from Literature and Latte

The figures are created using Canvas X from Canvas GFX

The mathematical formulas are generated using MathType from Design Science

MATLAB code using MATLAB version 2015a from Mathworks

Octave code using GNU Octave version 5.1 from GNU Octave site

Python and Sympy through Anaconda Python 3 distribution

All figures used for illustration are from public domain sources. The majority of them from Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia). If a particular figure in this book should not be present because of proprietary reason, please notify the author and he will exclude it and update the electronic file.

Some table of properties are also from Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia).

I would have welcomed any assistance for editing the manuscript. I have done it twice for content and several times for formatting. Initially I planned to publish this as an epub file where formatting can be lose. However for reaching a bigger audience a pdf file in letter size made more sense. That means compiling and editing images so that they remain complete. Adjusting code so that there is no unintentional wrapping. I am sure there are lots of errors still. Hopefully with your help I can capture it in the website for the book.

P. Venkataraman

January 2020.

Rochester, NY, USA.

Email : Venpanch1@outlook.com

Profile: https://sites.google.com/site/venkatpan/

Alumni:

I. I. T. Kanpur, B.Tech, 1974

Rice University, PhD, 1984