Truss Member Load Calculator

Qatar University

College of engineering

Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering

GENG300 – Numerical Methods L03

Fall 2015

Term Project

Truss members Axial Load and Deflection Calculator

Group members
Jamal Adel Hannun 201300283
Ahmad AlZainy 201207087
Ahmed ElSherbini 201305790
Ahmed Adel Mahfouz 201203975
Riad mekideche 201303623
Moaz Mohamed Karamalla 201207423
 Truss Member Load Calculator

Problem definition and formulation:

Our project is mainly concerned on how the truss distributes the load which acts on it through its
members and all the way to the supports. As we know we have many kinds of loads that could
act on any truss. For example live load, dead load, wind load, seismic load and dynamic loads.
All of these loads are affecting the truss in a way or another and it pass through the members all
the way to the foundations. In this term project a truss is analyzed with one point load in the
middle and the lengths of the members were defined

Problem significance:

Because it's important to know how much the truss could resist the load which acts on it
before it collapses. Since it may cost loss of life, and to minimize the percentage of error
that may happen in the manual calculations, a Matlab code is needed to calculate
systematically the axial load of the subject truss members. Equations from this course are
utilized in order to make it easy for the user to calculate a point load for example on a truss
to see how much each member take.

Methodology

This project depend heavily on a set of numerical methods taught in the class. A group of
numerical method will be utilize to solve a set of equations and unknowns that represents
the axial forces in the truss members.

Software development

Matlab is the main software to be utilized to solve this problem. A number of MatLab
functions and scripts will be used and will be developed by the team to obtain the required
solution.