Structural Stability and Mechanics

This course covers the fundamental concepts of elastic stability of structures, with a focus on buckling. It provides a comprehensive understanding of the critical load of structural elements and the different types of buckling. The course uses the example of a simply supported column to illustrate these concepts. It also emphasizes the importance of understanding structural stability for engineers, highlighting the catastrophic consequences of instability failures. The course further delves into the characteristics of equilibrium and the concept of critical load. It concludes by discussing various methods to calculate the critical load, including the equilibrium approach, energy approach, imperfection approach, and dynamic approach. The course also covers the kinetic approach for estimating the critical load of structural elements and different types of buckling. It further explores the fundamentals of weighted residual methods used in structural mechanics and their application in solving differential equations.