HigherEd 2.0

Just stumbled upon another shear and moment resource on the web. This one appears to be pretty good because you can solve the problems on your own, then use their graphical flash-based diagram drawer to check your work.
If you are still struggling somewhat with V & M, this might be a really […]

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Once again I point you to this Flash module, which explains shear flow with some nice visualization and animation. It’s even got some narration. I strongly urge you to spend some time with this–it will really support your understanding of these problems.

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The Facts
We had a small discussion in class the other day about the graphical method for shear and moment diagram construction. In particular, we had some difficulty with determining whether a particular quadratic-or-higher-order curve was concave up or concave down. For instance, we had a case of a linear shear, and the question […]

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There was a question in class today about why the stress-strain curve looks the way it does, with its increases (strain hardening) and decreases (necking). I don’t do this sort of thing for a living, but I couldn’t explain it better than this.

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The factor of safety is a somewhat mysterious but always necessary recognition that as engineering designers we do not always know everything we would like to know. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld provides some unexpected wisdom here. He might say: “You design using the information you have right, not the information you […]

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Just wanted to let you know that we will have a new category on the blog coming soon…The Explainer! It will be the location for alternative coverage of certain topics, deeper explanations of things, and also links to related issues we may not have covered very deeply in class. I may even occassionally […]

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