‫جامعة النجاح الوطنية‬ An-Najah National University

‫كلية الهندسة وتكنولوجيا المعلومات‬ Faculty of Engineering & IT

Civil Engineering Department

Mechanics of Materials Lab (10601202)
Second Semester
2019/2020
Report Sheet
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬

Equilibrium of Forces
Date Performed: February 5, 2020
Partners: Abdalaziz Kharaz
Karsou Karsou
Tahseen Qashou

Section: Wednesday 8-10 AM

Instructors: Hind Tbaileh,

Eng Noor
 1. Introduction :

In our daily life , we see many types and shapes of

constructions , and ask ourselves why these structures
are not moving?
The answer of this question is one simple word, the
equilibrium, it is the main condition in building
constructions and other structures, but what is
equilibrium and what is its main condition?
there are two types of equilibrium:
a body at rest and a body is moving with a constant
velocity in a straight path.
In both types the acceleration is equal to zero, but since
our experiment is about statics, we will focus on the first
type.

2. Objective :

In this experiment we're going to discuss the equilibrium

of forces acting on a rigid body like a circular ring, to
study the equilibrium of concurrent forces (as defined in
2.1) ,to locate the centre of the ring by adding weights.
finally ,to confirm the conditions for static equilibrium of
forces in two dimensions.
 2.1 Definition

Equilibrium: The body is said to be in equilibrium if the

resultant of all forces acting on it is zero. There are two
major types of static equilibrium, namely, translational
equilibrium and rotational equilibrium. But here we're
concerned with translational one.
*Formulas for concurrent force system:
ΣFx=0 ΣFy=0

Concurrent force system: a concurrent force system

comprise forces whose lines of action meet at some one
point.

3. Theory :
The law of equilibrium states that the sum of all
actions acting on a body is equal to zero, this
means that the acceleration of the body is zero and
this is how it's stay under equilibrium. when an
external force acts on a body the internal forces
will be exerted inside the body to stay in
equilibrium so, equilibrium of forces is a
fundamental issue we should consider when
designing structures to keep them statically stable
with no transition or rotation.
 4. Apparatus :
We used many tools such as, ring stand, pulleys,
strings and hangers as shown in (4.1)

4.1: Ring
Pulley

String

Hanger

5. Methodology :

We started by adding small weights to each hanger till

the axis of the bolt has the same alignment with the axis
of the ring, this is how achieved the equilibrium. After
that we measured the angles using point marker after
.sticking white paper across the ring
6. Results :

Force
# (N)
ᶿ
1 1 48◦
2 1.2 36◦
3 1.2 34◦
4 1 30◦

7. Calculations :

ΣFx=0
F1cos θ1 - F4 ′cos θ′4 + F2 cos θ2 – F3 cos θ3 = 0
1cos 48 - F4 ′cos θ′4 + 1.2 cos36 – 1.2 cos 34 = 0
0.67 - F4 ′cos θ′4 + 0.97 – 0.99 = 0

F 4 ' cosθ ' 4 = 0.65 ………….(1)

ΣFy=0
F1 sinθ1 - F2 sinθ2 – F3 sin θ3 + F4 ′sin θ′4 = 0
1 sin48 - 1.2 sin36 – 1.2 sin34 + F4 ′sinθ′4 = 0
0.74 - 0.70 – 0.67 + F4 ′sin θ′4 = 0

F 4 ' sin θ ' 4 = 0.63 ………….(2)

By dividing the equation 2 over 1 we have:
F 4 ' sin θ ' 4 / F 4 ' cosθ ' 4 = 0.74/1.29
' '
tanθ 4=¿ 0.57 θ 4=44 .3◦
 F 4=0.906 N
%ERROR=¿ TRUE−exp∨ ¿ ∗100 % ¿
TRUE

%F4=¿ 0.906−1∨ ¿ ∗100 %=9.3 % ¿

1
%θ4=¿ 44.3−30∨ ¿ ∗100 %=47.66 % ¿
30

8. Discussion & Conclusion :

Newton's second law tells us that the sum of the forces

acting on a body is equal to the mass of the body
multiplied by its acceleration, but in equilibrium the
acceleration is zero , then the sum of the forces is zero,
and no translation was done to my structure. since the
four forces acting on the ring in our experiment are
concurrent (there line of action passes through the
centre of the ring) , we can say that there is no moment
around the centre so no rotation has appeared on my
structure, and since the ring under equilibrium, after our
calculations have been made we can easily clarify the
sources of errors as shown in 8.1. Explanation of error
and other mistakes are discussed in 8.2.

8.1 Source of errors :

 The main sources of errors in this experiment that
the pulley was not rotating well due to the friction
between string and pulley , the weights of the
hangers and the rods which we neglected in the
calculations ,calculating the angles of the forces,
the elongation of strings and the hangers was
moving with low horizontal distances(Simple
harmonic motion) affecting the calculations.

8.2 explanation of errors :

according to our results the percentages are not

accepted because all of them are above 5%
(%error>5%).
Angle percentage was 47.66% which is defective ratio
(%error>15%).
Force percentage approaches 9.3% which is also not
accepted and need calibration.