Teaching

Welcome to Engineering Mechanics I. This class is usually referred to as “Statics,” but w’ll be covering some extra material that typically falls into the category of “Dynamics.” For the majority of this class, we will be looking at mechanical systems that do not move, or are in “static equilibrium.”

In this course we begin with a brief statics review, and then spend some time introducing the subjects of stress and strain in a material. From there, we will take these tools and use them to solve problems for a variety of different loading scenarios. This includes beam theory, shaft theory, mechanics of columns, and mechanics of pressure vessels. We will also develop the notions of principal stresses and strains, and conclude with energy methods.

This is a unique class that meets jointly with the MAE departmental seminar series. It is designed to expose undergraduate students to graduate-level research and to introduce them to the modern problems and challenges in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

In this course we will develop the mathematical framework for describing precisely the deformation of solids, fluids, and gasses, and describing the physical laws that govern their motion. We will develop the mathematical formulation of the equations of motion, elasticity, viscoelasticity, plasticity, and other types of material models. We conclude with a brief introduction to computational mechanics.

This course is a sequel both to MAE 3201 (Mechanics of Materials) and MAE 5100 (Continuum Mechanics). In this course we formulate the equations of linearized solid mechanics, and focus on finding solutions to linear elastic problems, including Lame solutions, waves in elastic media, and linear elastic fracture mechanics.