Ball and Socket Joint

by Nicholas McAdams

Submitted : Spring 2014

For this problem I choose to use a subject from my Statics class. This problem has a ball and socket joint with two wires holding up a pole. In this question, I was asked to find the support forces in the ball and socket joint and the tension in the two wires that help hold up the pole. The first step of the problem is to find all the forces that are acting on this pole. This includes the support force in the ball-and-socket joint which creates a support forces in the x,y,z direction, it also includes the tension in the wires and the external forces acting on the pole. The next step is to separate all these forces into separate Forces of Equilibrium equations. When then use the moment of Equilibrium equation were we took the dot product of the forces and unit vectors. We then find out the unknown tension forces, which then conclude to finding out the support forces in the ball-and-socket joint.

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