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16-Pearl
July 1, 2023
Question

Mathcad Community Challenge July 2023 - Civil Engineering

  • July 1, 2023
  • 6 replies
  • 14847 views

This month’s challenge is based on civil engineering:

DaveMartin_0-1688230090777.png

 

DaveMartin_1-1688230090782.png

 

Images created with Creo Parametric, Advanced Framework Extension, and Creo Simulation Live.

 

Scenario: You have a standard 300mm steel I-beam with a length of 12 meters. It is simply supported at one end and at 8 meters from that end. There is a load of 5000 Newtons in the middle and 10000 Newtons at the unsupported end.

  • Calculate the cross-sectional area of the I-beam.
  • Calculate the cross-sectional moment of inertia about the midpoint of the beam. (You may choose to ignore the contribution of the fillets. If you want the additional challenge, you may include them.)
  • Use the Chart Component to display shear and bending moment diagrams.
  • Calculate the deflection at the end of the I-beam. 

You may ignore the effect of the fillets as necessary for shear, bending moment, and deflection.

 

Additional resources:

 

Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!

 

6 replies

14-Alexandrite
July 2, 2023

Hello Dave, please confirm the boundary conditions. The statement says that the beam is simple supported at one end and at 8 m from that end. Per the image, it seems that it is fully anchored at one end and simple supported at 8 m from that end.

16-Pearl
July 2, 2023

Simply supported at both locations. Per the image caption, I made it using Creo Simulation Live and used the Fixed Displacement constraint, thinking it would convey the idea. Perhaps that was wrong. But go with the verbiage, simply supported at one end and at 8 meters from that end.

23-Emerald I
July 4, 2023

Challenge in Prime 4 Express.

7-Bedrock
July 13, 2023

Hi Dave,

Please find my contribution in attachment, I used the well-known approach with singularity functions to solve the problem.

Now I can go on holiday with peace of mind 🙂

Kind regards,

Jan

16-Pearl
July 21, 2023

I love how beautiful your worksheets are.

3-Newcomer
July 21, 2023

Hi.

I have attached my solution to the challange, where I also used a singularity function.
Greetings from Slovenia.
Robert

16-Pearl
July 21, 2023

Very nice. I like the use of Solve Blocks and graphing with both XY Plots and the Chart Component.

 

4-Participant
July 27, 2023

Dave:

Here is my solution to the beam. 

Dennis Fallon

18-Opal
July 28, 2023

Awesome, and welcome back to these challenges!


For everyone's reminder, July is almost over, so if you've been procrastinating, you pretty much have a couple of days and a weekend left!

18-Opal
August 1, 2023

Thanks to everyone who submitted a response in July!

While we wait for Dave to review the responses here, I'd be remiss not to mention that my PTC colleagues on the Creo side are now working with Dave on a Creo Community Challenge series (set up similarly to what Mathcad has been doing). Those are set up as modelling challenges. You can check out the first one of those, just posted, here. It's about the Archimedes screw water pump.

 

This won't interfere with Mathcad's challenges, by the way. We already know what the Mathcad September challenge will be, in fact. Stay tuned.

18-Opal
August 16, 2023

Alright, time to finally unpin this post because the July 2023 solution blog is finally up on mathcad.com:

https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/community-challenge-civil-engineering 

 

Thanks again for those that participated! Badges were distributed some time ago.

 

...Be on the look out for the September challenge in two weeks.

16-Pearl
August 1, 2023

One last submission as we close out July's challenge. Since I am not a civil engineer, I was fortunate enough to have Dr. Pat Heffernan vet my proposed challenge. Based on the original worksheet he provided, I was able to tweak the loads for results I liked (attached).

 

You can find the replay of Dr. Heffernan's portion of the "Mathcad for Civil Engineers" webinar here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1By7p3dw9d0 

 

Dr. Heffernan's YouTube channel with several helpful Mathcad videos is here:

https://www.youtube.com/@PatJHeffernan 

 

The blog write-up for this month's challenge will be available in a few days.

 

Cheers,

Dave