COE 3001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Thermal Expansion, Statically Indeterminate

• School: Georgia Tech
• Department: College of Engineering
• Course: COE 3001
• Professor: Thomas Susan

Document Summary

All of the members and structures that we have considered so far were assumed to remain at the same temperature while they were being loaded. We are now going to consider various situations involving changes in temperature. Let us first consider a homogeneous rod ab of uniform cross section, which rests freely on a smooth horizontal surface (fig. If the temperature of the rod is raised by t, we observe that the rod elongates by an amount t which is proportional to both the temperature change t and the length l of the rod (fig. We have where is a constant characteristic of the material, called the coefficient of thermal expansion. T and l are both expressed in units of length, represents a quantity per degree c, or per degree f, depending whether the temperature change is expressed in degrees celsius or in degrees. With the deformation t must be associated a strain.