In this course you’ll develop a sound understanding of techniques applied to statically determinate beams and frames.

This course contains worked examples to help you further embed the skills you’ve developed in the preceding course.

Now we move on to learn about the moment distribution method for analysing statically indeterminate beams and frames. This will massively broaden the range of structures you can analyse.

Following the same approach of learn then practice, this course of examples will help further hone your analysis skills.

We’ll start by developing an understanding of the Principle of Virtual Work and how to leverage it for analysis of axially loaded members. This will allow us to determine forces, reactions and deflections in pin-jointed truss structures.

We’ll move on to apply Virtual Work to statically determinate beam and frame structures. After completing this course you will have expanded your toolbox to be able to calculate deflections in beams and frames.

In this course you will utilise everything you’ve learned so far to analyse indeterminate structures consisting of both bending and axially loaded members.

This course focuses on nailing down core concepts in structural dynamics. But rather than a typical ‘Intro to Dynamics’ course, we’ll use our knowledge of the fundamentals to build a numerical analysis algorithm that you can deploy in the real world.

In this course, we build on your knowledge of fundamental dynamics and expand into multi-degree of freedom systems. A central aim of this course is to help you become proficient in modal analysis; probably one of the most widely used dynamic analysis techniques.

This course introduces you to the Direct Stiffness Method. This is the fundamental finite element analysis method. The aim of this course is to build your own generalised truss analysis programme and build the foundation for a more complex solver in the next course.

In this course you’ll develop a solver that handles structures subject to shear and bending. By the time you complete the course, your generalised beam and frame solver will be able to output shear force diagrams, bending moment diagrams and deflected shapes.

Next we move to 3D! We’ll expand on the code we wrote in The Direct Stiffness Method for Truss Analysis with Python, to accommodate 3D space frame structures. This course also introduced you to Blender, a powerful open source 3D modelling software that makes the process of developing 3D structural models much faster.

This course takes beam and frame analysis into the 3D world. You will build on what you learned in all three previous courses to develop your own feature rich 3D structural analysis programme. At this point in the pathway, you will have mastered the direct stiffness method and have a suite of structural analysis tools at your disposal.

This course introduces the Isoparametric Finite Element Method. You should be comfortable jumping to this course after completing the first course in this pathway. After completing this course you will have a suite of tools to analyse 2D plane stress and plane strain structures. You’ll have an excellent understanding of stress analysis, principal stresses and even von Mises failure criterion.

This course is our first introduction to finite element analysis of non-linear structures. In this course, we’ll build an iterative solver based on the Newton-Raphson method. Our solver will simulate the behaviour of axially loaded structures that undergo large deflections. We’ll place particular emphasis on cable structures as these are classicly geometrically non-linear and a real challenge to simulate.

This course builds directly on what you learned (and built) in the 2D course. We’ll be extending into 3D structures which opens the door to more complex geometry and interesting structural forms. Modelling and form-finding stable structural geometry become a challenge for 3-dimensional tensile structures. So we’ll also explore ways of ‘finding’ stable structural forms through simulation.