Civil and Environmental Engineering 2219A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Numerical Integration, Composite Application, Structural Engineer

• School: Western University
• Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Course: Civil and Environmental Engineering 2219A/B
• Professor: Martha Dagnew

Document Summary

Integration is finding the area under the curve of some function. Numerical integration is another way of finding the area under a curve. Municipal engineer: might need to know the area of a piece of land bounded by a water body (lake/river) and two roads. Water resource/hydraulic engineer: may want to know the cross-sectional area of a river to calculate the rate of flow q. Structural engineer: may need to determine the lateral force due to non-uniform wind blowing against a side of a tall building (the wind tunnel!) Idea: replacing a complicated function or tabulated data with a polynomial that is easy to integrate where fn(x) = an nth order interpolating polynomial. The newton-cotes formulas are the most common numerical integration schemes. One example of these kind of formulas that you"ve seen and are familiar with is the. Its a way of converting a function into a an easily integratable polynomial.