ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns structures and investigates how buildings stand up and stay standing up. It deals with one particular type of structural member, those which span horizontally, specifically beams and slabs. Beams are linear in nature, have a fixed width and span between two supports, slabs normally have a large width compared with their depth, cover a significant area. Another effect that beams experience when subjected to weights is shear. The shear force is defined as the force tending to produce a shear failure at a point. The bending moment indicates the magnitude of the bending effect at any point in a beam. The chapter discusses a few basic structural concepts, namely force, moment and equilibrium. It analyses the effects of bending and shear. There are two basic types of loading: point loads and uniformly distributed loads, the latter generally known by the acronym udl.
