Degrees of Freedom: Why 6? Why 3? In Wildfire 5.0, users were allowed to apply distributed moments over the faces of solid parts, as shown in this simple beam model. In reality, such a load has no physical meaning, and if you defined such a load, Mechanica (now called Creo Simulate) would let you know with this warning message.In Creo Simulate 1.0, users are no longer allowed to create such loads, as indicated by the inactive moment area of the newer Force/Moment dialog.Analogous changes were made to the Constraint dialog as well.Some Simulate users were confused by this change and wondered if some of the existing functionality had been removed from the product. The goal of this post is to explain why we made this change and to help users employ other methods to apply moment loads to their modes.Most mechanical and structural engineers were introduced to the theory of beams during a strength of materials class early in in their undergraduate education. In that class, we learned that for long and slender beams, we
