This course helps Civil Engineering students develop the important skill of visualising and computing the manner in which structures respond under the application of external loads. Students are introduced to the different types of commonly encountered structural systems, and the idealisation schemes typically employed to model them. A series of techniques are then developed to analyse structural models and compute the displacements and internal forces induced in them under the action of external static and dynamic loads. The analytical and numerical skills developed in this course are fundamental to the study of advanced Structural Engineering concepts in the 4th year and beyond. Furthermore, the concepts covered are also transferable to other engineering disciplines.

The course is split into two parts. The first half covers techniques to analyse the response of simple structures under time-varying dynamic loads. Methods are developed to compute the response of linear single degree of freedom systems under free vibration, periodic loads, pulse loads, and earthquake ground motion. The second part provides an overview of different structural systems and discusses techniques to visualise and compute their response to static loads. It specifically covers statically determinate and indeterminate analysis techniques, energy methods, the principle of virtual work, and the flexibility method of analysis