
In this section, we're going to lay a lot of groundwork and tackle many of the core concepts that you will take with you throughout your study of dynamics.

We start by introducing the concept of lumped mass analysis as a technique for approximating continuous structures. Then we'll discuss the spring-mass-damper model. You can think of the spring-mass-damper model as a fundamental tool used to simulate dynamic behaviour. It offers us a simple mechanical model that can be used as a proxy that exhibits the same dynamic behaviour as our structure.

We'll spend the rest of our time in this section examining the characteristics of the spring-mass-damper model and its free vibration behaviour. We're going to cover some really core concepts along the way such as natural frequency, damping regimes and the logarithmic decrement.

We finish the section with a couple of numerical examples and take our first dive into using Jupyter notebooks in this course. These example questions will help embed your understanding of what we've done so far.


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