Civil Engineering is one of the broadest engineering fields that contains planning,

design, construction, maintenance, and overall operations of infrastructures that

surround us for example roads, buildings, bridges, water supply and many other
facilities. Today we’re going to focus on the fundamental physic theories, practice,
and creations on why things are resistant to pressure and don’t fall down based
on the book “Structures or Why things don’t fall down” by J.E. Gordon. The 1 st and
main question would be how does an inanimate solid such as steel or stone or
timber is able to resist mechanical force at all? It all lies in the root of the study of
structures overall and is intellectually quite difficult. A man like Galileo couldn’t
really comprehend this phenomenon but the problem got eventually solved due
to Robert Hooke. He realized that the structure can only resist a load if it can push
back with equal force.
This is implicit in Newtons 3rd law of motion. In other words, a force cannot just
get lost, but it must be always balanced or reacted by another equal and opposite
force at every point of the structure. If the conditions aren’t in equilibrium or
balance with each other then the structure has a probability to break. Scientist
Hooke didn’t stop there since he invented a law, to be exact “the law of
springiness of solids”. It states that the power of any spring is in the same
proportion with the tension, so that means that if one power is stretched in one
space, two powers will bend in two spaces and so on. He clearly saw that every
kind of solid changes it’s shape by stretching on contracting itself, when a
mechanical force is applied to it. Also, it is the change of shape which enables the
solid to do the pushing back. Of course, there’s a lot of materials that can’t
manage to push back, but today we’re focusing more on the ones that can.
Stress and strain. The idea of stress was nearly stumbled upon by Galileo himself,
but a scientist named Cauchy explained and solved the problem clearer. Stress is
a measure of how hard the atoms and molecules which make up the material are
being pushed together or pulled apart as a result of external forces. In other
words, stress is used to show how much force/push/pressure can a specific area
withstand and if it can’t manage to do it 100% then it explains how the specific
area will be pulled apart and broken. This is particularly useful in civil engineering
since it makes sure that certain constructions and buildings are safe to use, and
will manage to withstand let’s say 5, 10 or even 20 stories without the question of
it collapsing. Strain. It’s similar to stress, but instead of showing with how much
force the area will be pulled apart, strain shows us how far they are being pulled
apart, that is by what proportion the bonds/connections between the atoms are
stretched. Engineering strains are usually quite small so engineers often express
strains as percentages to reduce the confusion that a traditional answer would
create. Pretty much every material can be tested how much stress and strain it
can withstand therefore scientist Young invented the so called “Young’s modulus”
which tells us how easily a material can stretch and be deformed and is defined
as the ratio of tensile stress to tensile strain. In other words, The resistance of a
material to elastic (recoverable) deformation under load. A stiff material has a
high modulus and changes only slightly affected by a strong force, a flexible
material does everything oppositely.
Strength. The strength of a structure is simply the load which will just break the
structure. This figure is known as the ‘breaking load’, and it naturally applies only
to some individual, specific structure. We are most often concerned with the
tensile strength of materials, which is sometimes called the ‘ultimate tensile
stress’ or U.T.S. This is the maximum stress that a material can withstand while
being stretched or pulled before breaking. Although there is a theory and formula
to calculate what kind of strength we need ,the calculations aren’t specific to the
dot and the range of strengths can be very wide for example Titanium alloys have
a tensile strength of 100-200 thousand psi of pressure so you can only really see
how strong it is when physically applying the pressure on a real titanium alloy and
with all the nuances added only then we can measure the real pressure it can
withstand. These unclear answers of such a important characteristic isn’t
acceptable to civil engineers so most of the time they reinforce the materials with
strong steel rods and so on.
Designing for safety. Naturally all this business about stresses and strains is only a
means to an end; that is, to enable us to design safer and more effective
structures and devices of one kind or another and to understand better how such
things work. Both for safety and for economy it is clearly desirable to be able to
predict how the various parts of an engineering structure will share the load
between them and so to determine how thick or how thin they ought to be.
Again, we generally want to know what deflections to expect when a structure is
loaded, because it may be just as bad a thing for a structure to be too flexible as
for it to be too weak. These studies for safety go back to the 18th century. A
considerable amount of mathematicians set themselves to devise techniques for
analyzing elastic systems operating in two or three dimensions and they began to
use these methods to examine the behavior of different shapes of structures
under loads. Although nowadays it seems normal to do that, many engineers back
in the day didn’t really understand the need for such deep mathematic formulas
and didn’t adapt to them. They even held a grudge for the mathematicians since
they didn’t like the newcomers to make new rules, but eventually, for our
convenience they settled down and accepted the fact that in order to make
something safe and usable you need to make calculations to the millimeter in
order to let people work around them.
Fractions or “work of fracture”. No construction or building has broken down on
itself in the matter of seconds without a single crack. At least one crack must be
made to spread right across the material, so as to divide it into two parts or let’s
say two surfaces which did not exist before fracture. In order to tear materials
apart the chemical bonds that hold the surfaces together must be broken. The
quantity of energy which is needed to break most kinds of chemical bonds is well
known – at least to chemists – and it turns out that, for most of the structural
solids with which we are concerned in technology, the total energy needed to
break all the bonds on any one plane or cross-section* is very much the same and
does not differ widely from 1 Joule per square metre. When we are dealing with
the range of materials which are, rather understandably, called ‘brittle solids’ –
which includes stone and brick and glass and pottery – this is nearly all the energy
we have to provide in order to cause fracture. As a matter of fact, 1 J/m2 is really
rather a pathetically small amount of energy. Naturally, this is the reason why, if
we can possibly avoid it, we do not use ‘brittle solids’ in construction. Thus the
energy which is needed to cause fracture in wrought iron or mild steel may be
about a million times as high as that needed to break the equivalent cross-section
of glass or pottery, although the static tensile strengths of these materials are not
very different. Fractions also in geotechnical engineering.
In conclusion, there are a lot of different factors that affect a building why and
why not it could fall. Some are more important, some are less important, but in
the end we need to be clear with all of them because most buildings and
constructions are used in one way or another by humans and the risk of someone
getting injured or killed isnt an option.
1. Geotechnical engineering
2. Deflections
3. Steel rods
4. Elastic systems
5. Reinforce
6. Fracture
7. Stress
8. Strain
9. Inanimate solid
10. Mechanical force
11. Equilibrium
12. Springiness
13. Contracting
14. Brittle solids
15. Structural solids
16. External forces
17. Chemical bonds
18. Modulus
19. Tensile
20. Static
21. cross-section