Statics

If you're on this page, you probably aspire to be an engineer one day! That's awesome! I'm thrilled to be a small part of your journey.

The fundamentals of Statics are based in mathematics. For this reason, this course can be taught in a very theoretical and abstract manner. Some professors prefer to teach it this way.

I am a visual/spatial thinker and prefer to teach with practical real-world examples. This is why I have given my materials the title of Seeing Structures.

My 2D and 3D visualizations have been designed to help you bridge the abstraction of engineering theory with the practicality and purpose of real-world engineering practice. They also help scaffold spatial analysis skills and provide an example that you can emulate in order to develop your own ability to communicate graphically.

Despite my tendency to explain complex ideas with pictures, and occasionally be a little silly, this is an academically rigorous Engineering Statics course. It has simply been designed in a way that is intuitive, fast to learn, and student-centered. At least, that has been my intent.

To put it simply, Statics is the study of rigid bodies that are stationary. They are not in motion or at rest; they are in static equilibrium. Well, technically bodies traveling at a constant velocity (zero acceleration) are also in the realm of Statics. But mostly, we focus on bodies at rest.

Statics is the bridge between the theory you learned in Physics and the upper-level engineering courses shown in the diagram below.

To begin our journey, let's pretend that someone has locked us in a room full of random objects and asked us to create something that was both sculptural and symmetric. 

No glue, tape, or other connectors were provided, so we built the sculpture by stacking objects on top of each other. Here is the design we came up with:

Our structure is not in motion. It doesn't translate (move) up, nor down, nor east, south, north, or west. It also doesn't rotate (pivot) about any axis. Intuitively, we observe that the structure is in the state of static equilibrium, or at rest.

In Mechanics of Materials (alternatively called Solid Mechanics, Mechanics of Solids, or Mechanics of Deformable Bodies), you will study the internal workings of the bodies and the way they change shape when loaded with force. 

For instance, the beam depicted above would slightly sag and curve under the weight of the bowling ball. 

In Statics, we limit our study to what we call rigid bodies. This means that we will not concern ourselves with how bodies deform (change shape) when forces are applied.

By the way, if you were to have clicked the image of the bowling ball sculpture, you would have opened an interactive model.

Please take a moment to learn how to navigate the interactive models: they're an integral part of this text. 

The trick is to locate the custom views under My Scenes. They work best on a laptop computer. I don't recommend reading this text with a smartphone or small-screen tablet.

You'll know that you have successfully navigated the model when you find the secret codeword!

Why are the interactive models important? We need to think in 3D in this class! The models will help you develop your visual-spatial skillset. We will have to switch back and forth between the reality of 3D and the practicality of 2D drawings. This particular model has both 3D and 2D views programmed in:

To answer this question, check out the image below.

Student (a) is studying Statics. They have balanced a solid block on their index finger, and the center of gravity is aligned with their finger. The system is in static equilibrium as shown. 

Student (b) is studying Mechanics of Materials. The system is in static equilibrium, but this student is learning about the curved shape of the deformed geometry, noticing that the block sags (slightly) under its own weight. 

Student (c) is studying Dynamics. Perhaps this student is studying the position, velocity, and rotation of the block as a function of time. (Alternatively, perhaps this student is still working on mastering concepts from Statics.)