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In classical mechanics, Euler's rotation equations are a vectorial quasilinear first-order ordinary differential equation describing the rotation of a rigid body, using a rotating reference frame with angular velocity ω whose axes are fixed to the body. They are named in honour of Leonhard Euler.
Classical mechanics is the branch of physics used to describe the motion of macroscopic objects. [1] It is the most familiar of the theories of physics. The concepts it covers, such as mass, acceleration, and force, are commonly used and known. [2]
Rotation or rotational motion is the circular movement of an object around a central line, known as an axis of rotation. A plane figure can rotate in either a clockwise or counterclockwise sense around a perpendicular axis intersecting anywhere inside or outside the figure at a center of rotation .
The moment of inertia, denoted by I, measures the extent to which an object resists rotational acceleration about a particular axis; it is the rotational analogue to mass (which determines an object's resistance to linear acceleration). The moments of inertia of a mass have units of dimension ML 2 ([mass] × [length] 2).
Rotation around a fixed axis or axial rotation is a special case of rotational motion around an axis of rotation fixed, stationary, or static in three-dimensional space. This type of motion excludes the possibility of the instantaneous axis of rotation changing its orientation and cannot describe such phenomena as wobbling or precession .
There are two main descriptions of motion: dynamics and kinematics.Dynamics is general, since the momenta, forces and energy of the particles are taken into account. In this instance, sometimes the term dynamics refers to the differential equations that the system satisfies (e.g., Newton's second law or Euler–Lagrange equations), and sometimes to the solutions to those equations.
A rigid motion in three dimensions that does not necessarily fix a point is a "screw motion". This is because a composition of a rotation with a translation perpendicular to the axis is a rotation about a parallel axis, while composition with a translation parallel to the axis yields a screw motion; see screw axis. This gives rise to screw theory.
An example is the calculation of the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth. As the Earth has a sidereal rotation period of 23.93 hours, it has an angular velocity of 7.29 × 10 −5 rad·s −1. [2] The Earth has a moment of inertia, I = 8.04 × 10 37 kg·m 2. [3] Therefore, it has a rotational kinetic energy of 2.14 × 10 29 J.