Welcome to the building phase of the course. All of the derivations and text-based lectures are behind us. Now we can start bringing things to life by building out our Python solver.

There are quite a few individual lectures in this section. This is because we’ll be keeping quite a tight focus in each lecture. This way, we’ll break up quite a large build into easy-to-digest bitesize chunks.

We’ll begin by blocking out the main structure of our code and establishing the main convergence loop. From inside this loop, we’ll call the main functions that build the stiffness matrix and solve for the nodal displacements and internal force system. Structuring our code in this modular fashion is going to be particularly helpful given the iterative nature of our solver.

Once we’ve implemented the main execution loop that allows for incremental convergence between the internal and external force systems, we’ll build the ability to break our external loading into smaller force increments. Allowing our code to seek convergence for smaller increments of loading will be key to achieving convergence in our analyses.

Once this section is complete, we’ll have a functioning solver that implements the Newton-Raphson strategy outlined at the end of section 3. Completing this section is a major milestone in the course.