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Consider the rotation of a rigid body. What is a rigid body? For any rigid body, the relative positions of the particles of it remain fixed: ( ) = const., where , s are the position vectors of the th and th particles with respect to some fixed coordinate system. Here we have considered a system of particles having 1, 2, 3,.N particles of masses , , ,. respectively. What is a rotation?
Eulers Theorem: In any kind of motion, where one point in the rigid body is fixed, it must be rotation. Motion = Translation + Rotation For a system of particles, total angular momentum is the sum of angular momenta of all the particles: = = = =
( ) (
=
(
Similarly, the y- and z-components can be separated out. For the coefficients of , and we write, , and , and and that of in terms of ,
Similarly, we can write the components of in terms of and so that we have the following relations:
This lecture Note series on Classical Mechanics is for 1st year undergraduate students in Physics.
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Where , , are the Moments of Inertia of the body about x, y and z-axes respectively. , , are the Products of Inertia. For example, is the product which is defined with respect to the xz and yz planes, that means in the expression of the distances ( and ) of a point particle inside the body are measured w.r.t the xz-plane and yz-plane and then the product is calculated. Now, we have got the following expressions for the Moments and Products of Inertia: So, we see that the products of Inertia share symmetric relations among them. Now we can think of a Matrix containing the moments and products of inertia:
Now is called the Inertia Tensor, the matrix is a symmetric matrix with six independent components. Thus the angular momentum components can be written in a short form: . , where and
= = = = = = [ as ( =
) ( )]
=
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This lecture Note series on Classical Mechanics is for 1st year undergraduate students in Physics.
3
In terms of components we can write,
= +
+ , + and ] (1)
Now if only the diagonal terms in the Moment of Inertia Tensor exist, we can write
( ) so that the Kinetic Energy now becomes
].
The axes for which the products of Inertia (off diagonal terms of the Inertia Tensor) are zero, are called principal axes of inertia. Note: An important property of principal axis is that if the rigid body rotates around it the direction of the angular momentum is the same as that of the angular velocity: = .
Ellipsoid of Inertia:
From the expression (1) we can write, + Or, ( (
+ ) + (
+ ) + (
+ (
]=1
)(
)+
)(
)+
)( +
) =1 + + + = 1, where
The above expression is called the ellipsoid of inertia. In terms of direction cosines, the expression for Kinetic Energy is written as
cos 2 +
cos cos ] 2 ,
cos 2 +
cos 2
cos cos +
cos cos +
This lecture Note series on Classical Mechanics is for 1st year undergraduate students in Physics.
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The Moments of Inertia of a rigid body around the three principal axes are the following: ( ), ( ), (
) = 2
The above formula is true in general, whether the body is 2D or 3D, does not matter. But in 2D, say in XY-plane, we have all zi s are zero. So, ( ), ( ), .
This lecture Note series on Classical Mechanics is for 1st year undergraduate students in Physics.
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