Applications of SolidWorks in teaching courses of Statics and Strength of Materials

Abstract

Statics and Strength of Materials are two core technical courses for any mechanical program. In Statics, vector operations: the parallelogram law, the triangle rule and the polygon rule are introduced and explained in the first two weeks. Many students, especially in the mechanical engineering technology program have difficulty using vector operations to obtain a resultant magnitude or its direction by the trigonometry approach because some students have forgotten the laws of sine and cosine. In the case of Strength of Materials, many students have a hard time understanding the stress concentration phenomena and some assumptions for stress formulas under different loadings. Some students are puzzled about the purpose and the approach of the Mohr's circle so they only sketch the Mohr's circle for visualization purposes but still use stress transformations to calculate the stresses at different orientations. Since 2010 we have introduced the idea of using the sketch tools in SolidWorks to run vector operations for statics and to draw Mohr's circle for determining the stresses at a given orientation. We also have used SolidWorks Simulation as a virtual lab and an alternative approach to visualize the stress distributions to facilitate student's understanding of stress concentration phenomena, and the assumptions of stress formulas under shear, bending and torsion loadings. The application of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses since 2010 will be summarized, presented and discussed in this paper. Results of student surveys conducted in the fall of 2011using the application of SolidWorks in these two courses will also be presented in this paper. According to the survey, students favored the application of SolidWorks in these two courses and would like to see more integration of SolidWorks in Statics and Strength of Materials courses. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.