Structural analysis is the act of studying the structure's behavior imposed with loads. It's a way to understand, get to know, and explore the building's skeleton. We answer questions such as: is it stable? How much load is it carrying? What stresses is it experiencing? How much did it deflect?
It serves as an initial phase before going to the design stage - finding the suitable material, size, and shape of the structure. Overall, it comes after analyzing the loads that the structure will experience in the complete design cycle.
What Should We Analyze?
There are four critical aspects of a complete analysis:
Stability Analysis
Stability is a structure's ability to remain as is when applied with various loads. Analyzing this helps us to verify whether we have arranged our support and members well.
Reaction Analysis
Reaction analysis deals with finding out how much load the supports carry.
Support loads serve as the basis for the foundation or connection design of structures - what footings shall we use? How many bolts should each connection be?
Force and Stress Analysis
All objects experience stress. Part of a complete analysis is to identify these under the imposed loads.
Knowing how much stress a member experiences will enable the engineer to appropriately design the structure's size and shape to these results.
Deflection Analysis
This type of analysis studies the structure's movement. In some design problems, engineers would need to limit it to ensure it's usable. For instance, imagine walking on a supporting beam, but it's pretty shaky - it's not the comfiest experience and may defeat the beam's purpose.
Performing these various analyses will depend on a lot of factors - the type of analysis and the approach we would take. For now, it's best to discuss the fundamental concepts that make up every procedure.
Summary
Structural analysis is the act of studying the structure's behavior imposed with loads.
It serves as an initial phase before going to the design stage
There are at least four aspects of complete analysis: stability, reaction, internal force and stresses, and deflection.
Stability is a structure's ability to remain as is when applied with various loads.
Reaction analysis deals with finding out how much load the structure supports carry.
Force and stress analyses deal with finding the internal effects of structures under imposed loads.
Deflection analysis studies the structure's movement from its original position.
