Elastic foundation — where it appears
Named by 3 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.
The beam that sits on the ground
Every other beam in this collection is held at points. A footing is held everywhere, by something that pushes back in proportion to how far it is pushed — and that single change hands the structure a length it did not choose. Two or three of those lengths from the column, nothing knows the load happened.
The deck is not there to carry the load
A cable takes the shape of whatever is on it, which is exactly the problem — under a point load its shape is a kink, and a kink is not a road. The stiffening girder exists to spread the load until what reaches the cable is something the cable's own shape is right for.
The deflection that belongs to the support
A beam calculation answers a question about a beam sitting on things that do not move. Real ones sit on bearings, on other beams and on columns that shorten, and every one of those is a spring in series with the member — so a deflection is the sum of two things and only one of them is a property of the beam.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
StiffnessCharacteristic lengthDeflectionLoad sharingAxial shorteningBearingCatenaryCompatibilityDifferential shorteningForm findingFunicularGeometric nonlinearity