6. Visualising the Strain and Stress Fields

This section is about mining for the additional information embedded within our model. We’re going to focus on building stress contour maps that show us how the different stresses vary throughout the structure. 

Before working through this section, you might find it helpful to review the stress analysis lectures in the appendix. Particularly if you’re not familiar with the concept of normal and shear strains and stresses at a point and the purpose of stress transformation equations. 

We’ll finish this section with another validation exercise and compare the stress distributions from our FE analysis with normal and shear stress distributions from fundamental beam theory.