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Spatial acceleration


In physics, the study of rigid body motion allows for several ways to define the acceleration of a body. The usual definition of acceleration entails following a single particle/point of a rigid body and observing its changes in velocity. Spatial acceleration entails looking at a fixed (unmoving) point in space and observing the change in velocity of the particles that pass through that point. This is similar to the definition of acceleration in fluid dynamics, where typically one measures velocity and/or acceleration at a fixed point inside a testing apparatus.

Definition

Consider a moving rigid body and the velocity of a point P on the body being a function of the position and velocity of a center-point C and the angular velocity \boldsymbol \omega.

The linear velocity vector \mathbf v_P at P is expressed in terms of the velocity vector \mathbf v_C at C as:

\mathbf v_P = \mathbf v_C + \boldsymbol \omega \times (\mathbf r_P - \mathbf r_C)

where \boldsymbol \omega is the angular velocity vector.

The material acceleration at P is:

\mathbf a_P = \frac{d \mathbf v_P}{dt} = \mathbf a_C + \boldsymbol \alpha \times (\mathbf r_P - \mathbf r_C) + \boldsymbol \omega \times (\mathbf v_P - \mathbf v_C)

where \boldsymbol \alpha is the angular acceleration vector.

The spatial acceleration \boldsymbol \psi_P at P is expressed in terms of the spatial acceleration \boldsymbol \psi_C at C as:

\begin{align} \boldsymbol \psi_P &= \frac{\partial \mathbf v_P}{\partial t} \[1ex] &= \boldsymbol \psi_{C} + \boldsymbol \alpha \times (\mathbf{r}{P} - \mathbf{r}{C}) \end{align}

which is similar to the velocity transformation above.

In general the spatial acceleration \boldsymbol \psi_P of a particle point P that is moving with linear velocity \mathbf v_P is derived from the material acceleration \mathbf a_P at P as:

\boldsymbol{\psi}{P} = \mathbf{a}{P} - \boldsymbol{\omega} \times \mathbf{v}_{P}

References

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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