Course overview
This course familiarises students with the principles of static equilibrium by applying Newton's laws of motion to solve engineering problems. This course is usually taken as a core component in various engineering programs but may also be suitable as an elective in other engineering programs. The course content is delivered with pre-recorded videos, which are reinforced in problem solving workshops. Success in the course is assessed with regular online assessments during semester and a final examination at the end of the course. Emphasis is placed on conceptual understanding of the engineering problems and concepts through drawing free body diagrams and self-checking strategies. This course is foundational in the development of key engineering competencies of knowledge and skill base for future practice, in many disciplines, as a professional engineer.
Course learning outcomes
- Define Newton's laws of motion
- Recall trigonometric laws and apply to the addition and decomposition of vectors quantities
- Identify the moment of a force and calculate its value about a specified axis
- Define the moment of a couple
- Describe the concept of dry friction and analyse the equilibrium of rigid bodies subjected to this force
- Construct "Free Body Diagrams" of real world problems and apply Newton's Laws of motion and vector operations to evaluate equilibrium of particles and bodies
- Apply the principles of equilibrium of particles and bodies to analyse the forces in planar truss members
- Discuss the concepts of ``centre of gravity'' and ``centroids'' and compute their location for bodies of arbitrary shape
- Apply the concepts used for determining centre of gravity and centroids to find the resultant of a generally distributed loading
- Use methods learnt for equilibrium of bodies and the resultant of a generally distributed loading to compute the internal forces in beams
- Generalise the procedure to construct bending moments and shear force diagrams (internal forces) and utilise this information in engineering design