Kinetics of Rigid Bodies:

A rigid body may be considered as a system of particles in which the distance between any two points is fixed. We can understand from this that the internal forces cannot cause mutual displacement of any two particles of the body and may be avoiding in studying the motion of the body.

We will consider only the plane motion of rigid bodies in this unit. Further, we shall limit our study to the rigid bodies which are symmetrical with respect to the plane in which the mass centre moves. Most of the engineering problems and applications are of this type.

We will study basically three types of motions of rigid bodies:

1.      Motion of translation - It has been already studied in the previous unit.

2.      Motion of rotation around a fixed axis.

3.      Plane motion of a rigid body.

Further, we already know that the plane motion of any rigid body is the combination of motion of a translation and a motion of rotation.