SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT USING MIT APP INVENTOR: MOBILE APPLICATION FOR STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF ISOSTATIC BEAMS

Resumo

Present in the curriculum of the Civil Engineering program, Structural Mechanics is one of the most relevant and complex subjects in the degree course, given the breadth of its concepts and methods. Structural Analysis is the branch of mechanics that studies structures, determining the internal forces and deformations they undergo when subjected to external loads. Structural elements are the components that make up a structure; one of them is the beam, which is a slender structural element that supports forces acting perpendicular to its longitudinal axis.Beams are classified according to how they are supported: a simply supported beam has support at both ends, with one fixed and the other movable (or roller); a cantilever beam has a fixed end (encastre) at one side and the other end free; an overhanging beam has one or both ends extending beyond its supports (Hibbeler, 2010).Therefore, this project aims to develop a mobile application for the Android operating system to assist Civil Engineering students in the structural analysis of isostatic beams during the Structural Mechanics course. Using the visual, intuitive, block-based programming environment of MIT App Inventor, the application BeamCalc was created.The software calculates support reactions and displays shear force and bending moment diagrams, as well as the maximum moment of isostatic beams under various types of loads. Throughout this work, important concepts were analyzed, such as types of beam supports, their respective support reactions, and the equilibrium equations. To validate the results, a comparison was made with those obtained using the Ftool software, showing the application to be effective.