Welcome to the strength of materials section of this website. For those of you who don’t know, strength of materials is a core area for mechanical engineering, and is part of solid mechanics. Having knowledge of strength of materials will give you the tools to calculate stress and deflection of an object due to an applied load, moment, or pressure. This extremely important since there will times when you need to determine when a critical part will start to deform and ultimately fail, or in some cases you might want to have a component fail to protect other key components in the assembly.
Before you begin this section you should first have an understanding of statics and how to create free body diagrams.
In this section you will learn about the differences between stress and strain. You will learn what Hook’s law is, and how it is used to relate stress and strain. Axial loading will also be discussed as well as stress due to torsion and bending. Finally, thin walled pressure vessels, , buckling, and stress concentrations will be discussed. Just to name a few.
If you are a new to strength of materials, I suggest that you read the articles in the order found in the navigation menu. I also suggest that you buy a decent strength of materials text book. I recommend a few good text books in various mechanical engineering areas in the right hand column of this website.
If you are just here for a refresher go ahead and take a look around. If you find something that is missing feel free to post comment at the bottom of each page.