UNIVERSITI KUALA LUMPUR

MALAYSIA FRANCE INSTITUTE

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING SECTION

Laboratory Experiment Sheet

ENGINEERING MECHANICS 1

SIMPLE MOMENT EXPERIMENT

OBJECTIVE

The objectives of the experiments are to demonstrate the equilibrium of moments.

THEORY

In order for a rigid body to remain in equilibrium, first conditions of equilibrium are state
that the horizontal and vertical components of all forces acting on a body must add up to zero. The
moment of a force or torque is a measure of the force’s tendency to cause rotation. It is defined as
a product of the magnitude of the force and the perpendicular distance from the axis of rotational
to the line of action of the force.

Force acting on beam can provide the effect of turning about an axis if it does not intersect
or is parallel to the axis. Consider the force in figure 1, which acts on a cantilevered beam and is
located a distance d from the vertical axis of a pipe.

Figure 1: Force acting on the beam

 Three perpendicular force components are F1, F2 and F3. It is seen that only F1 tends to
rotate the cantilevered beam and pipe about the axis F2 and F3 do not cause the cantilevered beam
to turn about this axis since F2 intersects the axis and F3 is parallel to it. The rotational effect of F1
is called the moment of force, MO. MO = F1 × d where d is referred to as the moment arm or
perpendicular distance from the axis at point o to the line of action of the force. Units of moment
magnitude consist of force times distance, N.m or kg.m.

The direction of MO consists of three dimensions which can be signified using the “right
hand rule”. The fingers of the right hand are curled such that they follow rotation as caused by the
force acting about the axis. The thumb then points in the direction of moment vector along the
moment axis. A two dimensional view is given in figure 2.

Figure 2: Definition of torque and moment.

When determining the moment of a force about a point, it is often convenient to use the
Varignon’s theorem since it was originally developed by French mathematician Varignon, and it
is also known as the principle of moments. This theorem states the moment of a force about a point
is equal to the sum of all moments of the force’s components about the point.

If the sum of all forces and all moments taken about point 0 are zero, the body is said to be
in statical equilibrium, since physically this situation maintains a balance of both force and moment.
Three scalar equations that express this condition are:

Σ Fx = 0
Σ Fy = 0
Σ MO = 0

Here ΣFx and ΣFy represent the algebraic sums of the x and y components of all the forces
acting on the body, and ΣMO represents the algebraic sum of the moments of all these force
components about an axis perpendicular to the x-y plane and passing through point o. simple
moment apparatus are demonstrate clockwise and counter clockwise moments of all forces acting
on the simple beam in equilibrium as shown in figure below. By convention, counterclockwise
moments are assigned a positive sign, while clockwise moments are given a negative sign.
 Figure 3: Beam in equilibrium

Figure 3 shows the beam stays in equilibrium. Free body diagram of all forces acting the
beam is shown in figure 4.

Figure 4: Free body diagram for simple moment apparatus.

Total force; Σ Fy = 0
RO – W1 – W2 – W3 – W4 = 0
Total moment; Σ Mo = 0
W1d1 + W2d2 – W3d3 – W4d4 = 0
W4d4 + W3d3 = W1d1 + W2d2
Σ MO clockwise = Σ MO counter clockwise

Analysis and discussion

1. Calculate the counter-clockwise and clockwise moment for this experiment.

2. Compare both values, discuss your answer and plot force versus distance graph (theoretical
and experimental).
3. Discuss 2 possible source of errors (other than parallax error) and how it’s can effect the result
4. Name some application by using this mechanism and explain it.
Endorsed by :

Technical Unit Leader HOS/ PC

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