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Inertia is the natural tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, unless a force causes the velocity to change. It is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics , and described by Isaac Newton in his first law of motion (also known as The Principle of Inertia). [ 1 ]
For a simple pendulum, this definition yields a formula for the moment of inertia I in terms of the mass m of the pendulum and its distance r from the pivot point as, =. Thus, the moment of inertia of the pendulum depends on both the mass m of a body and its geometry, or shape, as defined by the distance r to the axis of rotation.
The moments of inertia of a mass have units of dimension ML 2 ([mass] × [length] 2). It should not be confused with the second moment of area, which has units of dimension L 4 ([length] 4) and is used in beam calculations. The mass moment of inertia is often also known as the rotational inertia, and sometimes as the angular mass.
Figure 2: Simple-minded frame-of-reference example. For a simple example involving only the orientation of two observers, consider two people standing, facing each other on either side of a north-south street. See Figure 2. A car drives past them heading south. For the person facing east, the car was moving to the right.
An arbitrary shape. ρ is the distance to the element dA, with projections x and y on the x and y axes.. The second moment of area for an arbitrary shape R with respect to an arbitrary axis ′ (′ axis is not drawn in the adjacent image; is an axis coplanar with x and y axes and is perpendicular to the line segment) is defined as ′ = where
Newton's laws are often stated in terms of point or particle masses, that is, bodies whose volume is negligible. This is a reasonable approximation for real bodies when the motion of internal parts can be neglected, and when the separation between bodies is much larger than the size of each.
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Moreover, any object traveling at a constant velocity must be subject to zero net force (resultant force). This is the definition of dynamic equilibrium: when all the forces on an object balance but it still moves at a constant velocity. A simple case of dynamic equilibrium occurs in constant velocity motion across a surface with kinetic ...