In this lecture, we'll cover:

• How to visualise the undeformed and deformed shape of a truss structure using Matplotlib
• How to plot members and nodal positions with appropriate aspect ratio and labelling
• How to incorporate global nodal displacements into the plotted geometry
• How to apply a displacement amplification (scale) factor for clear visualisation
• How to annotate the plot with scale information and numerical displacement values

In this lecture, we focus on the final stage of our structural analysis: visualising the results. We reproduce the same plotting approach used previously for the two-bar example to demonstrate that the overall process remains unchanged. We create a figure and axes in Matplotlib, enforce an equal aspect ratio to preserve geometric accuracy, and manually plot the undeformed members and nodal positions. This reinforces how the structure’s geometry is defined directly from nodal coordinates.

We then build the deformed shape by adding the calculated global displacements to each node’s original coordinates. To make the deformation visible, we introduce an amplification factor and apply it consistently to the displacement terms. We enhance clarity by distinguishing the deformed configuration with a dashed red line and by annotating the plot with the displacement scale factor and selected nodal displacement values. This gives us both an intuitive visual understanding and precise numerical information in one clear graphic.

Next up:

In the next lecture, we begin Section 8, where we fully generalise our code so that it can analyse any truss structure from a single set of input data.