Simply supported beam—the Myosotis method

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] The sixth way we’ll derive the formula for the center deflection of a uniformly loaded simply supported beam is the Myosotis method, which I wrote about over a decade ago. This is the method popularized1 by J.P. Den Hartog in his Strength of Materials textbook. Image from Wikipedia. Myosotis is the genus of the forget-me-not flower, and the idea behind the Myosotis method is to memorize the following six equations for the tip angle and deflection of a cantilever beam under different loading conditions. Once you have the formulas memorized, you can combine them to generate the solution for almost any beam that’s subjected to point and uniformly distributed loads. I wouldn’t say the Myosotis method is, or has ever been, a practical tool for working engineers, but it’s a great pedagogical tool for teaching engineering students how to take advantage…