designboom.com: developed by paul kassabian, a professional structural engineer and teacher at MIT, the application 'structures: a visual exploration'helps architects and students better conceptualize the way bridges and other complex architectures behave. it provides an animated,visual understanding of how things work and how they all interconnect. for example, it is capable of demonstrating how arches buckle based on thrust lines that are the opposite shape of a cable, how bending moments in beams and frames are generated,or showing how prestressed beams work.
6 comments:
As someone who is taking structures currently, I think this is an amazing idea. Math does not come very easily to me, and I work very hard to make all the concepts clear. An program like this I think really help people like me who having the visual representations makes all the difference. Which is, I am sure, the intended market. But I think that it can also help those who are doing incredibly complex problems, and they need a double check. But as with all machines and technology, its limitations need to be kept in mind.
There are a few things I can see in the screenshot of this app that I don't normally see in physics simulator apps such as "Bridge Architect" or other more entertainment-oriented games:
- Stress simulation in three dimensions instead of just across one plane
- The usage of human hands as anchor points or points of movement. Although I haven't used the app, I am immediately more drawn to the familiar image of pushing or pulling something with my hand instead of just watching a structure move on its own. I think I'd get the concept either way, but this can help anyone start to wrap their heads around the concepts a little more quickly.
I don't think the draw here is to help with the math of structural analyis - though the program may be able to do that, I'm not sure. What I think is interesting about this is it helps visualize the forces acting upon and within a structure. As TDs, let's be honest are we going to pull the structures book out everytime or are we just going to overbuild something? We're going to overbuild it. (Even when we do the math we still often overbuild things.) This will help with overbuilding because we will better understand what forces are at work so we'll have a better idea of what cords, columns, or beams to butch-up.
I think it is a tool for basic concept depiction: ie, what bends where and why. Aside from that, without using the program it's hard to say that these screenshots do much more than depict those relationships, which is certainly useful but has its limitations.
I really like this. A similar program is something that I have used in the past to check my work on some rigging math. I too have taken a structural designer course and seeing the graphic representation to forces at work is always useful to understanding the complete concept. The instructor of the class was always using real life examples so show how the numbers play out in the real world. He would like a program like this. All ready we can put sensors on thing s to really understand how much stress in on an object in real time.
I won't be left out of the Structures Comment-Fest 2012. I looked at downloading this app, but for two bucks the price tag was too steep. I'd rather have the cup of coffee. But from the screenshots, it seems the point is to translate the physics of structures into two basic elements: pushing and pulling. The hands are a cute way to represent this, but what looks more useful to me is the way the author uses red and blue to differentiate between components that are in tension verses those in compression. It also seems, in some of the truss depictions for instance, that he mixes the colors to shades of purple where components are experiencing both pushing and pulling. I don't know enough (yet) about truss structures to know if this is accurate or not, but if it is, I could see the gradient being useful in understanding those complexities. I wonder if he has any chapters on cross-sectional analysis that shows cross sections of different types experiencing tension and compression on either side of the neutral axis. That would be particularly useful to us in our study of beam design right now.
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