FEA Study

At the end of my Numerical Methods class, I was tasked with creating an experiment using an existing numerical algorithm or formula. My team opted to do a study of FEA.

We tested how two aluminum beams bent when weights were added to them, choosing two beams with different sizes to see how length and thickness would affect bending. Then we compared these real measurements to what we expected using a computer model.

We also wrote a MATLAB program using the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory to predict how much each beam would bend. We found that the program matched the experiment well for the long beam but wasn’t as accurate for the short beam because it didn’t include shear effects. In the future, we would improve the model to handle this. Overall, we learned how to combine experiments and computer simulations to understand how beams bend under load. Our final report can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SDmiJ-TyFI3EIVSUGo6V17ns4ywbSgvo/view?usp=sharing