Up to this point we have considered only or mainly one type of applied stress acting on a structure, member of a structure, beam, shaft, rivet, or weld.
Many situations involve more than one type of stress occurring simultaneously in a structure.
These problems can become relatively complicated. We will look at several examples of relatively simple combined stress problems. One of the principles we will apply in these examples is the principle of superposition, that is, the resultant stress will be the algebraic sum of the individual stresses - at least in the case of similar stresses acting along the same line, such as the axial stress due to an axial load and a bending stress. We look at this type of problem in the example below. We would like to determine the maximum axial stress acting in the beam cross section.