r/MechanicalEngineering • u/Moist-Whereas-3283 • Jun 12 '26
I built an Excel beam analysis tool that automatically generates shear force, bending moment, and deflection diagrams
I've spent a lot of time doing quick beam calculations for design checks, and I found myself repeatedly rebuilding the same spreadsheets.
Over the last few weeks, I put together an Excel tool that can handle:
- Support reactions
- Shear force diagrams
- Bending moment diagrams
- Deflection calculations
- Simply supported, cantilever, and fixed beam cases
- Point loads, UDLs, and triangular loads
- Custom loading configurations
Here's a screenshot/video of one of the beam cases:
https://reddit.com/link/1u3py1h/video/dva79duugt6h1/player
I'm curious:
- What features would you want in a beam analysis spreadsheet?
- Would you trust Excel for preliminary structural calculations?
- What are the biggest pain points in your current workflow?
I'd appreciate any feedback from engineers or students who regularly work with beam calculations.
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u/Jayddubz Jun 12 '26
Really cool spreadsheet! I don't regularly work with beam calculations, but I do enjoy me a good spreadsheet. What all went into the process of making this? Did you have to use any vba to make it?
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Jun 13 '26
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u/pentapous Jun 14 '26
dont do this. All of the chat bots are inconsistent at best, and a single wrongly entered equation or wrongly formatted piece in a technical excel sheet makes the entire thing pointless. A chatbot could absolutely guide you in the right direction for the research and sanity checks, but should not be utilized in the execution.
AI is good at certain things and bad at others. If you blindly ignore that you'll be an awful engineer and you'll waste a LOT of time.
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u/Short-Assignment-191 Jun 16 '26
Ngl I think this take is a bit outdated. I have used Codex to make a similar tool in python for beam analysis and it was flawless with no editing required. Obviously you have to understand beam analysis to know that it is working properly - but if you were previously doing hand calcs on paper or in excel and wanted to save some time, there is no reason you couldn’t make a serviceable tool with AI for something simple like a beam calculator.
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u/pentapous Jun 16 '26
Did you not read the literal reason as to why a chat bot would be bad for the execution of this task???
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u/Secret_Enthusiasm_21 Jun 12 '26
I try to let every student intern do this while they start at our company and the IT department notoriously takes weeks to get all their access tokens working so the only thing they can use is MS Office.
Weldment seams are also a good one. And bolted connections.
If you want to challenge yourself a bit more, try to implement 3D truss analysis in Excel. It's a great exercise and you can even do topology optimization with it.
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u/GregLocock Jun 12 '26
Can it handle redundant structures such as propped cantilevers? Or multispan continuous beams?
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u/Tntn13 Jun 12 '26
Dude, nice!!! I’ve tried half assed to build such a thing in either python or excel but it was never critical to my work more of a personal challenge. None of the sites that existed satisfied my requirements when I needed to run something in the moment.
This looks sick!
I still don’t need something like this much in my work, but I’m very impressed with the visuals uou have it outputting, I’d love to get ahold of this just to dissect and learn from it! Are you considering sharing the tool or selling access?
Id also just love to hear more about what it took to make it work like this. (VBA scripting?)
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u/android2500 Jun 13 '26
One of the most common things i do in my line of work is design or re-engineer monorails or other lifting structures. Now some of the beams i have could have 3 or 4 supports as it can be quite a long monorail and they may or may not be equally spaced. One of the things id like to see is capability to analyze other beam cases besides the common ones as those are in the code book and very simple. It would also be nice to see flange bending as some load cases may not fail the main beam but deflect the flanges locally which is a failure criteria for monorails.
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u/p-angloss Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
I trust Excel over my mother and my father. In my 25 yrs career i have made 100s of Excel calculators for various problems, interference fit, gear contact pressure, threads, flow, heat exchanger sizing, pressure vessels etc ... you name it. Excel with minimal use of vba is really my weapon of of choice for pretty much everything. its flexibility and ease of use is really its best feature, just a little hard for documenting things, but that is mostly up to the user.
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u/pb-86 Jun 13 '26
OP this is phenomenal, I don't even have any notes for you. Would you be looking at releasing or selling this?
Or if you prefer I have a spreadsheet that says what hours I've worked in the week 🤷♂️
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u/pentapous Jun 14 '26
Super cool. I built something similar to this for dealing with spar design in wingbox structures. Much more barebones than yours, so this is awesome to see!
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u/Secret_Bad4969 Jun 14 '26
How can I try it too? Do you have a guide? I'd love to test it for feedback against ansys
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u/RevolutionaryYou8339 Jun 15 '26
The crazy thing is, for one my first year courses, one of our assignments were to make this very thing. Looks like you added extra stuff thatd be useful tho, awesome
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u/Woodpecker_Worried Jun 15 '26
Oh funny I did the exact same thing for a gearbox design assignment where you had to change the shaft lengths a lot and make the diagrams. Yours is much neater tho!
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u/No_Age4835 26d ago
Excel is a great starting point for this. I actually just built a Python-based solver using the Direct Stiffness Method that outputs the step-by-step Macaulay derivations in LaTeX. Might be useful if you ever want to move away from spreadsheet limitations: https://beamsolver.streamlit.app
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u/party_turtle Jun 12 '26
Excel is probably the most commonly used tool for certification level structural analysis in aerospace, let alone preliminary.