Summary

Mechanical and civil engineers utilize two- and three-dimensional theories of stress and strain to determine if structural beams will fail. Simple mathematical models can be used to make accurate predictions of failure due to shear, bending, and torsion stresses and due to deflection. Solving beam related problems typically involves integrating discontinuous functions and solving for boundary conditions. The integral calculus and algebra details often hide the trees for the woods. This project is centered around developing a package for SymPy that can be used to model and solve analytical beam problems, without getting bogged down in the mathematical details.