The Behavior of Beams - Essay Example

MECHANICS OF MATERIALS- PRACTICAL 2 – BEAM DEFLECTION affiliation Introduction The experiment aimed at investigating the behavior of beams and their deflections when subjected to lateral loadings. The beams were of different shapes.DiscussionBeam deflection is affected by several factors; with height being the biggest factor. The height of a beam is inversely proportional to the deflection of the beam; the longer the height, the smaller the deflection. Thus, the deflection of the flat beam is highest because its height is lower compared to the RHS (h>b) beam.

The type, load, and shape of the material also affect the bending. Bending varies with the shape of the beam, whether the beam is hollow, T shape, solid or hollow circle. A thicker beam holds more loads and has less bending since it is more rigid and solid. Moreover, the type of load has an effect on bending. Uniformly balanced loads have less bending effect compared to non-uniformly distributed loads. This is attributed to the fact that in uniformly distributed loads, the stress and pressure are distributed throughout the beam.

In non-uniform loads, the loads are concentrated at a single point, thus stress is bigger and more bending occurs. Errors in this experiment are both systematic and random. They include errors due to parallax and zero errors where the sensitivity of the meter gauge was not factored in reading the values. Unwanted movements at the set-up could also have led to random errors. Such errors caused the results to slightly vary from the theoretical results.ConclusionThe behavior of different shaped beams and their deflections were studied and understood.

The deflections varied with height, shape, and type of load; hence, the objective of the experiment was achieved.