COE 3001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Free Body Diagram, Stress (Mechanics), Centroid

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

Document Summary

This entire course is going to deal with forces and deformations. These two fundamental concepts are described in mechanics of materials by the quantities stress and strain. To help us visualize these concepts, let us consider the achilles tendon. We are going to assume that the achilles tendon is straight and has a relatively constant cross-section over its length something we call a prismatic bar. We are also going to assume that the tendon, when subjected to loading, is loaded directly along its axis or centroid this is an axial force or load. This results in a uniformly distributed force over the cross-section of our tendon or prismatic bar. This is one of the most fundamental loading conditions we can study. Assume that the tendon has an original length l and a cross-sectional area a. The tendon is loaded with an axial force f. as a result of the axial load, the tendon will be stretched by an amount .