INTEGRAL CALCULUS

My Course and Integral Calculus

Name:

Francisco, Joseph A.

Date:

March 9, 2015

CYS:

BSCE 2-1

Professor:

Engr. Aureluz Torres

There will be no doubt when you would encounter civil engineering students who see
Integral Calculus as another distress in their lives, after experiencing how Differential Calculus
was a tough barrier through their summer destination. They could interrogate and say Ano na
naman yang Integral Calculus na yan? Makakain na ba yan?. Maam Torres, you dont have
to be angry with that. It is very normal for people to consider no essence of what they dont
understand, the same way with how people judge whom they do not know. How would you
know him/her if you wouldnt befriend? You can visit his/her Facebook profile anyway. Well we,
the BSCE 2-1 of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, did so; not with whoevers
profile, but Integral Calculus. Unlike the girl that recently accepted my friend request, this one
is not that easy to make friends with. Than any other girl, this one is more mysterious! Studying
Integral Calculus surpassed the insomniac nights that I spent texting with someone. Luckily,
Google never leaves me behind; and so I came up with this essay laying proofs that Integral
Calculus is not just a set of reversible problems to solve in order to get high grades in school, but
rather a wonderful method to practice in order to make use and appreciate a prelude to the big
industry of civil engineering.

Mathematical formulas (especially those that are relative to Physics) are broadly used in any
field of engineering. Without the discovery of Integral Calculus, would formulas be such? Of
course, not all formulas were formulated after using sets of methods in Integral Calculus. There
are some. However, there are plenty of those in the field of civil engineering.

Lets take this popular example: the bending of beam. A structural beam is designed to support
load over a span. A specific type of beam is a cantilever beam which is a beam with one end
completely fixed so that it cannot move. If a load or force is applied at the end of the beam, the

beam will bend downwards. The beam will experience the highest stress at the end where it is
fixed. The stresses that it experiences are proportional to how high the load is and how far the
load is from the fixed end. In civil engineering, the term bending moment is calculated from
the product of the load multiplied by the distance; therefore, bending moment = (load)(distance).
That was easy, not when I say that the bending goes through constant linear change. As I
remember from what Maam Torres has taught us, Calculus is the mathematical study of physical
change. Furthermore, the bending of the beam requires another calculation, a method involving
Integral Calculus. I asked Google how to apply Integral Calculus in the previous formula, and it
showed me this:

Look, an integration symbol! With shaded acute triangles! Rather, the value of distance as the
upper limit and zero as the lower limit. How did that happen? Well, we identify which dimension
is changing with respect to another dimension and determine the independent variable, and that
would be load in which the constant changes linearly with distance accordingly to our
triangularly distributed loading case, making an equation

We then write the differential dF, as a product of f(x) and an infinitely small change in the
independent variable x, dx; and substitute the second equation to the first. By integrating both
sides of the function from some value x=a to x=b, we calculate the net change in the dependent
dimension F, further arriving to the last shown equation which is now ready to use in the field.
There are still many other formulas in civil engineering that were derived using Integral Calculus
that I would just mention for the sake of the 1 to 2 pages rule: plate theories, surface areas,
curves in dams, flow rates of fluid, archways in bridges and masses of civil-engineered
structures.
Thats all, Maam! I hope that this had not been tedious and unworthy to be read.