You may also find my notebook "An Introduction to Mathematica for Civil Engineers" useful. It covers a lot of ground with examples relevant for civil engineering, including some on structural design. It is available, for free, on Wolfram's Notebook Archive at https://notebookarchive.org/2025-03-cx2tujb

Have you looked at the Documentation pages on PDE modelling? And, in particular, the section on Solid Mechanics?

Hi It depends on what you want to do. Writing a routine for solving continuous beams or trusses is quite straightforward. Plane frames is doable with effort but if you want 3D space frames I would suggest that you use commercial software. Some links - https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/StressPropagationInATrussBridge/ https://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Articles/1271/ However, if you need finite elements to design slabs, concrete structures or other structures that lend themselves to finite elements, then the Wolfram finite element package is excellent and relatively easy to use. https://reference.wolfram.com/language/FEMDocumentation/tutorial/FiniteElementOverview.html.en https://reference.wolfram.com/language/PDEModels/tutorial/StructuralMechanics/SolidMechanics.html

The finite element library that comes with WL provides functionality for performing solid mechanics. This means analysis on solid objects, like I-beams etc. The functionality provided is for 2D, 2D axisymmetric and 3D cases. There is no 1D or 1D axisymmetric functionality or solid mechanics. The main reason for this is that it is not very useful for solids.

What you are looking for, as far as I understand, are modeling trusses. This is from the domain of structural (not solid) mechanics. If you want to model this, you can use NDSolve directly; but you'd have to set up the equations yourself. There is no pre-packaged functionality available, that I am aware of. An alternative choice for modeling trusses would then be to use system modeler. See for example this post

https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2887842

So, as Malcolm pointed out, it depends a bit on what exactly you want to do. If you want to do solid mechanics then you'd used SolidMechanicsPDEComponent and if you want to model trusses then system modeler is a possible choice unless you want to get your hands dirty and use NDSolve.

A third option might be to use the third party product Timo Structural

https://www.wolfram.com/products/applications/timostructural/

Though I have not used this I am not sure about the scope of it.