Fundamentals of Virtual Work for Civil Engineers

In this course you’ll be introduced to an immensely powerful method of civil engineering analysis. A fundamental requirement of any civil engineer is an ability to estimate how a structure will deform and behave under load. The Principle of Virtual Work is an elegant and efficient tool that gives us that ability. Being able to look at a structure and estimate the magnitude of its deflection is a key milestone in the development of any engineering student – the aim for this course is to help you hit that milestone!

Using my experience as a senior university lecturer in structural engineering, each video lecture is structured and delivered to ensure you get the most out of your time investment. If you take this course, don’t expect to sit back and let the videos wash over you – you’ll need to actively work your way through the course, constantly comparing your developing understanding with what you learn in each lecture.

You’re strongly encouraged to develop your own notes as we move through the course…we’ll be avoiding ‘death by PowerPoint’ at all costs. The mode of presentation is predominantly through hand-drawn notes and sketches; a method universally favoured by every engineering student I’ve ever had!

Section 1:

In the first short section I’ll set out the plan for the course, discussing what we’ll cover and why I’ve structured the course the way I have. This is followed by a short video where I offer you some advice on maximising value from the course. Anyone familiar with my style of teaching will know what to expect here 🙂

Section 2:

In this section, we’ll cover some of the essential background knowledge required to proceed through the course. Basically, you need to be able to analyse statically determinate trusses to determine their internal member forces. To bring everyone up to speed, we’ll make sure you can do this by the end of this section.

Section 3:

In section 3, we’ll start thinking about structures as energy storage devices and how this allows us to tie together the concepts of work, energy and elastic deformation. What we’re doing in this section is laying the groundwork required to develop a solid understanding of virtual work in the next section. By the end of this section you’ll understand what we mean by strain energy and you’ll have conquered your first energy-based analysis technique.

Section 4:

Here we’ll introduce the Principle of Virtual Work. This should be much easier to digest after completing the previous section on strain energy. In this section, we’re simply focusing on the principle of virtual work and the building blocks required to use it in our structural analyses. For many students that struggle with virtual work, this is the missing link!

Section 5:

Now that you understand the Principle of Virtual Work and how it evolves out of some pretty simple ideas, we need to take it and turn it into a structural analysis technique. In this section we’ll develop the analysis strategies that you can routinely apply to pin-jointed truss structures. Understanding the material in this section is going to be key to you being able to use virtual work as an analysis technique out in the wild beyond this course.

Section 6:

At this point you’ve covered all of the groundwork and should have a good understanding of the theory that underpins the principle of virtual work and how it applies to structural analysis. Now it’s about practice. In this section there are five practice questions to get you started and help you confirm for yourself that you’ve understood everything we’ve worked on in this course. After successfully completing this final section, you’ll be confident in determining how one of the most common forms of civil engineering structure (trusses!) deform under load.

I hope to see you inside!