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Goals and assumptions

Stress analysis is generally concerned with objects and structures that can be assumed to be in macroscopic static equilibrium. By Newton's laws of motion, any external forces being applied to such a system must be balanced by internal reaction forces, which are almost always surface contact forces between adjacent particles — that is, as stress. Since every particle needs to be in equilibrium, this reaction stress will generally propagate from particle to particle, creating a stress distribution throughout the body.The typical problem in stress analysis is to determine these internal stresses, given the external forces that are acting on the system. The latter may be body forces (such as gravity or magnetic attraction), that act throughout the volume of a material; or concentrated loads (such as friction between an axle and a bearing, or the weight of a train wheel on a rail), that are imagined to act over a two-dimensional area, or along a line, or at single point.

In stress analysis one normally disregards the physical causes of the forces or the precise nature of the materials. Instead, one assumes that the stresses are related to deformation (and, in non-static problems, to the rate of deformation) of the material by known constitutive equations.