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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 previous equations for planar motion can be used here: corollaries of momentum, angular momentum etc. can immediately follow by applying the above definitions. For any object moving in any path in a plane, = = ^ the following general results apply to the particle.
It is the inertia of a rotating body with respect to its rotation. The moment of inertia plays much the same role in rotational dynamics as mass does in linear dynamics, describing the relationship between angular momentum and angular velocity, torque and angular acceleration, and several other quantities.
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.
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.
The torque-free precession rate of an object with an axis of symmetry, such as a disk, spinning about an axis not aligned with that axis of symmetry can be calculated as follows: [1] = where ω p is the precession rate, ω s is the spin rate about the axis of symmetry, I s is the moment of inertia about the axis of symmetry, I p is moment ...
For a spheroid having uniform density, the moment of inertia is that of an ellipsoid with an additional axis of symmetry. Given a description of a spheroid as having a major axis c, and minor axes a = b, the moments of inertia along these principal axes are C, A, and B. However, in a spheroid the minor axes are symmetrical.