Introduction
Civil engineering is the discipline of engineering which deals with the design, construction, analysis, and maintenance of physically or naturally constructed environment such as dams, bridges, infrastructures, roads, canals, sky scrapper, pipelines and railways. One of the vital disciplines that enjoins all the aspects of life.

To know complete details, various civil engineering online courses are available in the civil era that you can avail at affordable prices with guaranteed quality study materials. It is known as the second oldest branch of engineering after military engineering. According to Hindu mythology, the ancient Indraprastha built by holy Pandavas has been a clear paragon of this miraculous discipline. Though there entails a wide scope of civil engineering so are the vast amount of subjects that it has. Let us look at one of the most important subjects related to civil engineering.

Its Strength of Material or SOM. One of the key branches so every aspirant should have a thorough knowledge of this discipline. Its vitality can be estimated from the fact that Civil engineering is incomplete without the Strength of Material. The most significant subject.

For every project being undertaken, the strength of the material is foremost considered at all points. You can’t exclude the fact that with the necessitate application of Strength of Material, the whole project may collapse or fail under various stresses.

Stress, the term we commonly hear during our life. It’s the psychological term that I am pertaining to. It’s a term related to the mechanical form of civil engineering. Like in chemistry, we have an atom. Similarly, in civil engineering, we Stress. But before that, it is important to know the definition of Strength of Material.

Definition of Strength of Material
Strength of Material is defined as the ability of a material to resist any mechanical forces while it is in use. It can be in a single form or combined form, depending on the application, it is been worked on.

Coming to stress, stress is the tendency of resistance of a material against the applied load per unit area. The load can be sudden or gradual. The unit of stress is the N/mm2. While the buildings are prone to various loads such as live loads or dead load. How efficiently the material of the building can hinder the applied force is what stress is.

Analogous to mental stress which is the ability to tolerate the society loads. But here society loads are been referred to as the force that is been acted in terms of civil engineering.

Types of stresses
Stresses are of various types where some are given below.

Tensile stress- the material applies to various kinds of forces or loads. But one very important kind of load that it is been prone to be the tensile loads. That is the ability of the load that pulls the material resulting in a decrease in cross-sectional area. So, tensile stress the resistance of the material against the pull by the external agent. It is termed positive stress. The formula of stress is the Load ( Force ) upon the cross-section area as shown below.

Sigma ( σ ) – F/A
But the major difference over here lies in the fact that Force here that is acting is the pulling force. The cross-sectional area is the area of the certain point of the material that is the 2D section. During tensile stress, the cross-sectional area decreases.

Compressive stress- Compressive stress is the opposite of tensile stress. Where in tensile stress it is the pulling force that’s been acted to calculate the tensile stress, it’s the pushing force that is been acted to calculate the compressive stress talking about the compressive stress field. Overall, the definition is the same in both. The difference lies only in the pushing (compressive stress) and pulling forces (tensile stress). It is termed negative stress as it reduced the length of the material through its cross-sectional area increases.

Bending stress- Yet another type of stress is bending stress. Bending stress or flexural stress is the stress caused by the bending moment between the material of the body.

Bending is the deflection of the material subjected to force either in the center of the material or at the two ends of the material in such a way that tensile load occurs at the bottom while the compressive or the negative load occurs in the upper part of the material depending on the position of the load that is been acting.

Either it’s the concave action or the convex action. Concave action is basically when tensile stress at the bottom and vice-versa at the upper part of the material. Whereas Convex action is another way round, tensile stress at the upper part and vice-versa at the lower part of the material.

The general practical application is the bridges where a lot of live loads are acting on the beam upon which the entire bridge is resting. The live load refers to the various vehicle and living creature movements on it. It results in bending stresses occurring at various points.

Shear stress- The type of stress that results in rupturing of the material is called shear stress. Also called tearing stress. Assume the block of certain material. The load is acting at the upper left point of the material while in another case, another load is acting on the bottom right hand of the material in the opposite direction. In such a case, the cross-sectional point of the material gets in slanting action resulting in slipping of one layer of the material to another.

Conclusion
Above are the four types of stresses in civil engineering. It’s vitally important for every civil engineering aspirant to know about these core stresses that come in handy during every aspect of life. Civil engineering training is the foremost important for every aspirant to get fully proficient in his/her field and stress is that term that acts as a core nucleus for every civil engineering aspect.

Dharampal

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