Calculate forces on a box

Question

Story: I am developing a construction tool for wooden boxes. A box consists of a set of boards, each board is represented as 3 3D-vectors, and one placement vector. Each box is visualized using OpenGL.

Now, these boxes will be moved around with forklifts, which will apply some forces on them. I would like to calculate the forces on each board in the box, such that I can see if a given construction is stronger than another, if any board is stressed too much etc.

So fellow stackers: How should I attack this problem? Are there libraries available I can use? Which books should I read to guide me on this? Can I use existing CAD tools to do the physics experiments?

I am using C# to compute everything, but this is not a requirement (though it would be nice).

Edit: What about libraries such as ODE and Bullet? Won't they be able to answer my question?

Answer 1

Before you can implement any computational devices here, you need some modelling. The problem of forces and stresses over a problem like this, with changing set-ups is a very complex one. What you do in Civil Engineering normally is modelling the building (or in this case the box) and use a finite element program to calculate stresses and forces. You need to make assumptions regarding the resistance of the materials.

In short, get a Civil Engineer or someone very knowledgeable in material physics to help you.

Answer 2

I second tekBlues' answer; you need a real civil engineer to work with on this. In particular, ODE and Bullet cannot help you. Both are designed around the physics simulation needs of video games: simulating the movement of unbreakable rigid bodies composed of primitive shapes very quickly. How they do this is only vaguely related to the workings of Newtonian mechanics. In particular, they don't keep track of forces propagating through a system of objects in any way that's useful to you.

I'm sure software packages exist to do this sort of thing, but I'm not personally familiar with any. Again, you need someone with experience doing engineering simulations.