The Route That Forces Take

Abstract

This article discusses that visualizing the load path in a design can uncover areas open to improvement. Planning the force transmission path during mechanical design is hardly dazzling engineering analysis, but explicitly doing so will improve your designs. By visualizing the transmission of forces, one can eliminate unnecessary parts, strengthen the design, and identify potential problems for further analysis or correction. Visualizing the path of transmitted forces for cables is pretty easy; forces follow the tension cables. But it is only slightly more complex with compression and shear involved. Although design is never a strictly linear progression, reviewing and refining the load path should be a formal part of the design process. Troubles with the load path in user-centered device design may become obvious with testing, but thinking about load paths as a human factor design issue can save time and effort. It is not a highly analytical design tool, but visualizing and refining load paths in structures and mechanisms is extraordinarily useful for designers, and it’s simple.