Free Body Diagram

A free body diagram, sometimes called a force diagram, is a pictorial device, often a rough working sketch, used by engineers and physicists to analyze the forces and moments acting on a body. The body itself may consist of multiple components, an automobile for example, or just a part of a component, a short section of a beam for example, anything in fact that may be considered to act as a single body, if only for a moment. A whole series of such diagrams may be necessary to analyze forces in a complex problem. The free body in a free body diagram is not free of constraints, it is just that the constraints have been replaced by arrows representing the forces and moments they generate.

Read more about Free Body Diagram:  Purpose, Construction, Example: A Block On An Inclined Plane

Famous quotes containing the words free, body and/or diagram:

    The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.
    Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)

    but as an Eagle
    His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
    So vertue giv’n for lost,
    Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
    Like that self-begott’n bird
    In the Arabian woods embost,
    That no second knows nor third,
    And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
    From out her ashie womb now teem’d
    Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
    When most unactive deem’d,
    And though her body die, her fame survives,
    A secular bird ages of lives.
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)