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 The free body in a free body diagram is not free of constraints, it is just that the constraints have been replaced by arrows representing the forces and moments they generate.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:
“I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
““God’s fire upon the wane,
A diagram hung there instead,
More women born than men.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)