By Fenya Savage Mantell and Luca Lodewick. Final project for ME20, Mechanics I, Fall 2024.

The goal of the project was to theoretically determine the normal stress and deflection of a pull up bar being subjected to a concentrated load in the middle.

In SolidWorks, I used the “Mate” function to construct an assembly of wall mounts and the pull up bar. Part of the FEA assignment required us to use one wall mount and half of the pull up bar. For that section I used half the applied force, created a virtual wall, and attached bolts. The purpose of this was to compare the stress in the x-direction and deformation in the y-direction between the two methods.

In the photos, you see the hand calculations for deflection, maximum normal stress, moment diagrams, and how they compare to the ones found by the FEA. I used the method of superposition to find deflection and stress in variables, then later plugged in the correct values. I then compared the results to the ones found by FEA in SolidWorks.