In this short lecture, I want to give you an idea of what you should cover before taking this course.

Much of what we cover in this course is about how to implement an iterative solver for the tricky problem of geometric non-linearity. This essentially involves implementing and updating the direct stiffness method in a loop. So, you should have a good understanding of the direct stiffness method for axially loaded elements. I’ll rely on the fact that you understand how this matrix-based analysis method works and won’t spend time explaining this in any great detail.

In fact, I’d probably go further and say even if you have knowledge of the direct stiffness method - you should take my course on applying the direct stiffness method to truss structures. That course is called, The Direct Stiffness Method for Truss Analysis with Python and it’s my entry point into matrix-based structural analysis.

The reason I strongly recommend completing that course first is that a lot of the code we write in this course, for example, how to build the overall structure stiffness matrix, solving for displacements and basically all of the nuts and bolts of the basic direct stiffness method, was written and explained in more detail in that course. You’ll lower the cognitive load on yourself if you encounter this code in a less demanding context first.

The next question to address is how much Python do you need to know? Usually, I say before all of my courses that you don’t need to know Python, you can pick it up while taking the course. Technically this is still true for this course. However, because there is a lot to contend with in this course, I would say trying to learn Python on top is going to be quite demanding. It’s not that the coding we’ll do is any more complex than what we’ve done in previous courses, it’s just about managing your mental workload.

This is another great reason to take the pre-requisite course. Get familiar with Python and how I implement the direct stiffness method in that introductory course first. This will leave you in a great position to tackle this course and really focus on what’s new and challenging about analysing non-linear structures.

Ok, that’s about all we need to say on prerequisites. If you’ve made it to this point and are happy that this course is right for you, let’s get stuck into it.