1. Stress
You know that feeling: You're lifting weights at the gym. What happens in your body? Exactly, your muscles are being stressed. In engineering mechanics, it's quite similar. Only that we're not talking about muscles here, but about components and structures.
Stress is the magic word. It describes how much a component/body is stressed internally when external forces act on it. It's kind of like the muscle soreness of engineering.
Can you imagine what a beam under tensile force looks like? It will stretch, right? In the inner cross-section of the beam, there are stresses. These stresses try to tear the beam apart.
Exactly, the beam breaks. That's why it's important to calculate and understand the stresses in components. This way, we can ensure that bridges, buildings and other structures are stable and safe.
By the way: Stresses occur not only under tension and compression, but also under bending, torsion and shear. In Engineering Mechanics 1, we already looked at section forces. Now we're going one step further and decompose the internal forces into stresses.
The stress \(\sigma\) is calculated simply by the formula:
F is the force and A is the area. The unit of stress is N/m2 (Pascal) or MPa.
In mechanics, the unit 1 N/mm2 = 1 MPa is often used.
Now it's your turn. Let your stress levels rise and answer these questions:
- What are the different types of stresses?
- How can stresses be calculated?
- Which factors influence the stress distribution in a component?
Tip: In the next chapters, we will go into more detail on these topics. So, stay tuned!