Module 22: Resultant Force on Surfaces

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From the course by Georgia Institute of Technology

Introduction to Engineering Mechanics

1128 ratings

Georgia Institute of Technology

Introduction to Engineering Mechanics

1128 ratings

This course is an introduction to learning and applying the principles required to solve engineering mechanics problems. Concepts will be applied in this course from previous courses you have taken in basic math and physics. The course addresses the modeling and analysis of static equilibrium problems with an emphasis on real world engineering applications and problem solving. The copyright of all content and materials in this course are owned by either the Georgia Tech Research Corporation or Dr. Wayne Whiteman. By participating in the course or using the content or materials, whether in whole or in part, you agree that you may download and use any content and/or material in this course for your own personal, non-commercial use only in a manner consistent with a student of any academic course. Any other use of the content and materials, including use by other academic universities or entities, is prohibited without express written permission of the Georgia Tech Research Corporation. Interested parties may contact Dr. Wayne Whiteman directly for information regarding the procedure to obtain a non-exclusive license.

From the lesson

Free Body Diagrams and Equilibrium Analysis Techniques

In this section, students will learn to analyze general equilibrium problems. Free Body Diagrams (FBD) will be defined. Concepts will be reinforced with example problems.

Module 19: Centroids5:13

Module 20: Method of Composite Parts I10:47

Module 21: Method of Composite Parts II8:44

Module 22: Resultant Force on Surfaces5:26

Module 23: Free Body Diagrams I8:15

Module 24: Free Body Diagrams II8:48

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Wayne Whiteman, PE
Senior Academic Professional
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

>> Hi and welcome to Module 22. For today we're going to look at

calculating the magnitude of a resultant force and its location for a force

distributed over a surface. So we're going to look at an example here.

And this is a special case, but we'll generalize it afterward.

Let's take a force that's perpendicular to the surface, so it's acting down.

Okay? And, the rectangular surface is shown here

as being flat and in the plane. So, this could be like a roof load, or a

snow load on a roof, or something like that, so I've.

All this, this pressure down acting a flat plane rectangular surface and the special

case that I'm going to look at is that the pressure is only going to vary in the x

direction. It's going to be constant in the y

direction. So what we're going to do is find the

resultant for a strip of infinitesimal width here dx and so my height here is p

of x. The, the force per area, the pressure, and

here's my width. And so if I multiply px by dx, I get a

distributed load here, and I can find the single force resulting for that in the

center. Which is the base, w, times the height px

dx. So that gives me a line down the center,

and so I've I can now look at that from the side direction and I've got a single

force per unit length over the distance l. So, that's pressure times The width, or

the w length here, so that's pressure is a force per area.

We've got a width of w here, so that ends up being a force per unit length f of x.

It acts over the entire length along the x-axis, which is l.

And so, now what I've done is I've reduced this problem to a, a forced along a, a,

the same as a force along a distributed er, force distributed along a line, and so

we can prosult, proceed with the final result using the techniques that we, we

used for finding the result in the longest straight line.

Now, if you didn't have pressure only varying in the X direction.

If you had pressure varying in the x and the y direction on any plane, flat

surface, you'd have to do a result in force location in the x direction by

integrating as shown here, and in the y direction as integrating shown here.

And so you're integrating over an area now, instead of over a line, so da is

equal to dx, dy where dx and dy can both vary.

If we then take and say that we have a constant pressure, these ps cancel, we can

pull them out from the integrals and they cancel.

And so what you get then is the, the, the resultant that you come up with is the

centroid for the area of that plane surface.

If we want to look at force distributed through a volume for example gravity or

electromagnetic force now our resultant force is the integral instead of over the

area it will be over the body so i've got integral over b or beta the body of the

force Which is, in this case I'm using g times little pieces of mass, dm, because

the, that acceleration due to gravity acts on each little piece of, of mass in the

body and so, g we can say to be constant, so we can pull it out of the interval, and

if we integrate over the entire body all these infinitesimal pieces of mass, that's

equal to the total mass. And so, the resultant force, as we would

expect, is mass times gravity, which is the weight.

Now, if we want to define the, the downward location of that resultant,

again, we would integrate. Now over the body of x dm divided by the

total mass, y dm divided by the total mass, and z dm tot-, divided by the total

mass. And that would give us our center of mass

for that resultant gravity force. Or, what's often referred to also as the

center of gravity. And, and one last note.

You'll, you'll find that dm Is equal to row dv where row is the mass density.

Okay? Or the mass per unit volume.

And if I look at a, a body then that has a constant mass density row, I can pull the

rows out. And now I get an integral over the volume

instead of over the entire body, and so, and, and, instead of using the integral

for, for mass and so I have the integral of x dV over the total volume, the

integral of y dV over the total volume, and the integral of z dV over the entire

volume, and that's the centroid of volume. And so you'll see that for a constant

density that the, the centroid of the volume and the centroid of the mass will,

will coincide. And so, that's just a quick lesson on how

to extend finding resultants and their locations from just along the distributed

line to. Having the ability to do it for surfaces,

which is, an application that's very relevant to real world engineering

problems. Thank you.

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