How Beams Work! (Part 1): Structures 6-1

hi i'm paul casabian i'm a structural engineer and yeah this is the third time i'm going to use paper for a demo on structural behavior and understanding so here what is a whole bunch of paper so this clearly is an advanced class if i hold a bunch of paper like this in my hand and then i'm going to let go with this hand slowly but hold on to the rest of the paper for my other hand then all of these flat bits of paper sheets just flop over right that's what they do each single piece of paper behaves by itself right these are all not connected together in any way so all that happens with all of this paper is that they flop over no interaction no connectivity between them now if i take a plank of wood why because wood paper and it's basically the same thickness as all of the paper that i'm holding then i can hold them opposite each other and clearly from a structural point of view the plank of wood is doing a much better job at carrying its own weight than all of the paper is and why is that so put that down it's because all of the paper all of the fibres of wood in here are connected together they're all working together so this as a cohesive whole is something that is working in many different ways in fact although you can't see it and this is what's kind of interesting is that there's tension on the top there's compression on the bottom and there's a whole set of shear going on on the side here we've seen this behavior when i went over trusses in the last video but you don't get to see the behavior in a plank of wood i find this very interesting because this is um the first on our topic of beams and a lot of people when they teach structural engineering or first start to learn about structures they start with a beam because after all what could be simpler than a plank of wood well visually it's very simple and sort of historically we think oh i want to span from here to there let me put a plank of wood down across the street however from a structural behavior point of view there's a lot going on in a plank of wood in a beam and in fact you know what's simpler than a beam structurally well a truss or a column or a cable which is why we started back with cables at the very beginning of this and you're going to see that we're going to bring what we've discussed earlier up to the level of understanding of the beam because the beam is really your all-purpose spanning structural element right so it becomes really important to know everything about how a beam works because there's a lot to unpack with this so we're going to be bringing from our past videos and images and understanding and we're going to be talking about that and i'm very excited for this stage actually because this is where a lot of things come together so i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Paul Kassabian

Views: 1,175

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Id: WpKazLxwIfc

Length: 3min 35sec (215 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021