Structural Analysis en Design

This course is a continuation of the series of courses in engineering mechanics looking at the analysis of internal loads, stress, and deformations of engineering structures. Within this particular course, an emphasis will be placed on lightweight thin-walled structures typically found in aerospace applications. Stress and deformation analysis methods developed in Statics and Mechanics of Materials will be extended to these applications, with an emphasis on simplifications and idealizations that can be made in order to allow first-order structural designs to be produced for given loading scenarios.

The primary topics that will be addressed in this course include:

• Unsymmetrical bending

• Torsion of thin-walled open and closed sections

• Shear of thin-walled open and closed sections (incl. shear centres)

• Multi-cell structures

• Sheet-boom structural idealizations

• Energy methods

• Buckling

• Cutouts and their associated reinforcements

These topics and their consequence on design will be thoroughly discussed in a traditional lecture format. Simple illustrative examples will be used to illustrate the concepts learned; however, their real power with respect to design typically requires iterative approaches and the use of tools such as Excel or Matlab to streamline the calculation process. To reflect this, examples will focus on generating parametric solutions (ie: stresses and deformations as functions of geometric and material properties) that could be directly used for such iterations.