INTRODUCTION

Have you ever wondered what holds up the floors in your house, the road on a bridge, or what keeps a skyscraper together? Well, the answer to all three questions is beams. Beams hold up things from roofs to floor to stairs on a building, wooden fences and ladders. The two figures below show the beams in a building and in a bridge. Beams are defined from the dictionary as: the crossbar of a balance, also, occasionally balance itself.

My science projet is about the strength and stability of beams. I am doing this for my science project because we have beams everywhere, and we don't even notice it. Beams are needed every where or else we would fall through the floor and roofs would fall on us.

Beams in a Building .................................................................Beams in a Bridge

1.1 Background Information
Beams are found everywhere in the world. They are found in the floors of your house, the roofs of your house, on a bridge, and even some historical landmarks such as Stonehenge, the Parthenon, and temple of Olympian Zeus.

Beams have been used as early as 2000B.C. to build things such as Stonehenge, England, and the Parthenon, Athens (438B.C.). Beams are a very important object in our everyday lives and we don't even notice it. Without beams, bridges would collapse, book shelves would fall, and we would fall through floors. Without beams we would not have any floors, and we would not even have a house to live in. Without beams, we would have nothing because companies need a building to manufacture things, and without beams we would not have buildings.

1.2 Objectives and Scope
For this science project, I wanted to establish the effect of the width on the failure load of rectangular beams for experiment: 1. In experiment: 2, I wanted to establish the effects of depth on the failure load of rectangular beams. I also wanted to establish the effects of a cross-section shape on the failure load for experiment: 3.

For experiment: 1, I decided to test on five different types of beams. Each type of beam will have a different width. For each type, there will be three identical beams. That means there will be a total of 15 tests. The dependent variable is the failure load. The independent variable is the width. The controlled variables are the material, length, depth, and the shape [rectangle].

For experiment: 2, I decided to test on a total of 15 beams like experiment: 1. Each of the five types have a different depth, and each type has three identical pieces. The dependent variable is the failure load. The independent variable is the depth. The controlled variables are the material, length, width, and the shape.

For experiment: 3, I considered five different shapes of beams. Three identical specimens were considered for each shape. Therefore, there was a total of 15 specimens. The dependent variable is the failure load. The independent variable is the cross-section shape of the beam. The controlled variables are the total material, and the length.