Python in Structural Engineering: Arbitrary load on a beam

Structural engineers like things to be rectilinear. Clients sometimes do not. What if you have a load with a complicated shape on your beam? Is it conservative to "smear" the load as a uniform distributed load? How would you know? What if knowing made the difference between winning a client and losing a client?

As far as I know, there is no published solution for this problem (let me know if I am wrong and provide a link to the solution in the comments below).

This video walks through an implementation for a general algorithm for solving the load shape and magnitudes for an arbitrarily shaped load on a beam. The algorithm has been included in the open-source library, papermodels, and is usable on its own for solving your own beam loading problems.

Streamlit demo application:

GitHub Repos:

Want to learn Python for structural engineering?

Music credits:
All music by William Claeson
Licensed from Epidemic Sound

Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction: The Fancy Planter
00:46 - Thinking through the solution
02:55 - Starting point: Four shapes + Overlap regions
05:52 - Dealing with void regions
07:40 - From Overlap regions to Singularity functions
12:01 - From Singularity functions to distributed loads
13:08 - Streamlit app: Distributed load from planter
14:38 - How you land the job!
15:12 - Random polygon examples
15:56 - The bigger picture
16:24 - Unsolved?
16:44 - Outro: StructuralPython training

[pascalgitz]

Hey Connor, may I ask you what software you used to create the diagram in 06:02 ? I'm looking for a tool to create sketches to include in my calculations (Jupyter).