Through Engineers’ Eyes

This quick video highlights your progress towards Engineers Eyes. The concept wheel shows how it all fits together.

Week 4 concept wheel (Click to expand)

For Part 2 we have a new wheel.

This week you found where gravity forces act so you could show them properly on FBDs.

It was an example of equivalent force systems. Gravity acts on all the particles of a body, but we generally need to represent this by a single force (weight) at a special point (the centre of gravity).

You saw two ways of finding centres of gravity by experiment (or perhaps you did the experiments yourself), but how can we find them by calculation? The answer is to use the method of composite bodies (preferably with a table or spreadsheet).

Oh yes. You also learnt about two-force objects: a neat trick that can simplify many an analysis.

Talking points

These are to get you started. Share any other thoughts you’ve had.

• From the video, according to S.M.A.K. (the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, in Belgium), the conceptual artist Panamarenko “… started building utopian aircraft in the 1960s…His quest for air-worthy constructions never resulted in functional machines. The possibility of failure is an inseparable part of his work, and gives it its poetic eloquence”. Does this have anything to say about engineers’ eyes?

Share your experiments

Don’t forget to share your experiments on the Through Engineers’ Eyes Padlet wall for this week.