Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
In the preceding chapter, methods for the kinematic analysis of moving frames of reference were presented. The kinematic analysis presented in the preceding chapter is of a preliminary nature and is fundamental for understanding the dynamic motion of moving rigid bodies or coordinate systems. In this chapter, techniques for developing the dynamic equations of motion of multibody systems consisting of interconnected rigid bodies are introduced. The analysis of multibody systems consisting of deformable bodies that undergo large translational and rotational displacements will be deferred until we discuss in later chapters some concepts related to the body deformation. In the first three sections, a few basic concepts and definitions to be used repeatedly in this book are introduced. In these sections, the important concepts of the system generalized coordinates, holonomic and nonholonomic constraints, degrees of freedom, virtual work, and the system generalized forces are discussed. Although the reader previously may very well have met some, or even all, of these concepts and definitions, they are so fundamental for our purposes that it seems desirable to present them here in some detail. Since the direct application of Newton's second law becomes difficult when large-scale multibody systems are considered, in Section 4, D'Alembert's principle is used to derive Lagrange's equation, which circumvents to some extent some of the difficulties found in applying Newton's second law as demonstrated by the application presented in Section 5.
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