Interesting article from Manuel Escamilla, CFCSL engineer, in Estructurando web.
Statics, what a structural engineers’ friend! The welcoming place in Mechanics where we like to stay and we feel balanced, far away from Dynamic’s entropic frenzy. What a comfortable satisfaction we feel when we see the structure built as it was designed in our drawings: immutable, rigid, stoic, firm, robust, strong, unmoved by the forces applied… Static.
“Eppur si muove”. And yet, it moves. Paradoxically (or maybe not?), to Galileo Galilei, one of the most eminent researchers of Statics, we owe the scientific paternity of its wayward sister: Dynamics. And with Dynamics comes the change, the evolution, the acceleration, the vibration, the resonance, the nonlinearity and other ghosts not as comfortably faced. In Nodaway’s Engineering, characterized by the design of increasingly slender structures, with longer spans, subjected to increasingly demanding solicitations, the analysis of dynamic phenomena is inherent to the design (as in life itself).
But in some occasions … continue reading in Estructurando
