Calculate moment of inertia of a "L" angle bent in a parabola

Shaheen, welcome to PF! :)

This forum is provided by new members to introduce themselves. You should not post anything here but "Hi, I'm Shaheen, and I'm new to PF" and other such introductions. I'm sure you don't introduce yourself to your friends by saying, "I have this beam bent in the shape of a parabola ..."

If you wish to start a thread with a technical question, PF has several different forums in which to post. Good Luck!

 

To be clear, are you talking about calculating the mass moment of inertia of this construction?

 

Do you have any drawings or sketches of this construction?

 

Since this assembly appears to have been created in some sort of CAD program, there may be a utility in the program which will calculate the MMOI for you. If the particular program you used to create this assembly does not have this functionality, perhaps your design can be exported to a program which can calculate the MMOI.

In any event, calculating the MMOI could conceivably be done manually by means of a mass take-off, but it would be a pretty tedious process.

 

Not in a few words.

Let me ask you this. Have you ever taken a university course in dynamics? Studied integral calculus?

 

Well, this structure is no simple shape like you find in typical course work problems, so forget about using a few simple formulas. It will require a long slog thru the basic definition of the MMOI using calculus, along with a helping of the parallel axis theorem, rotated coordinate systems, etc.

This was why I mentioned using a CAD program to do the calculations. It's a lot quicker and much less prone to error. IDK if you are using any particular CAD programs in your ME studies, but a package like Autodesk Inventor should have the tools necessary to do MMOI calculations for this structure.

Even if you don't have access to Autodesk Inventor as part of your studies, you can download a free student edition:

http://www.imaginit.com/software/autodesk-products/inventor

 

Good Luck!