Reaction Forces on a Beam with a Distributed Load

by Daniel Singleton

Submitted : Spring 2012

In this project there was two beams given that had different loads distributed on the beam. Part A had a beam that had a linear load across the beam, but had different magnitudes at certain parts on the beam. There was two ways to solve for the reactions forces at both ends of the beam. The first way was by integrating the load and the moment functions across the beam, and the second way was to use approximation of the loads and the moments by using Riemann’s sums. The reactions forces were the same in each method. Part B had a load that was continuously changing at each point and there was no function given to integrate it with. So Riemann’s sums was the only way to find the reaction forces magnitude by using the trapezoidal approximation to get the average values between the left and right end points.

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