A Variationally Consistent Approach to Constrained Motion

A variationally consistent approach to constrained rigid-body motion is presented that extends D'Alembert's principle in a way that has a form similar to Kane's equations. The method results in minimal equations of motion for both holonomic and nonholonomic systems without a priori consideration of preferential coordinates.

Unified Approach for Holonomic and Nonholonomic Systems Based on the Modified Hamilton’s Principle

As basic principles for deriving the equations of motion for dynamical systems, there are d’Alembert’s principle and the principle of virtual power. From the former Hamilton’s principle and Langage’s equations are derived, which are powerful tool for deriving the equation of motion of mechanical systems since they can give the equations of motion from the scalar energy quantities. When Hamilton’s principle is applied to nonholonomic systems, however, care has to be taken. In this paper, a unified approach for holonomic and nonholonomic systems is discussed based on the modified Hamilton’s principle. In the present approach, constraints for both of the holonomic and nonholonomic systems are expressed in terms of time derivative of the position, and their variations are treated similarly to the principle of virtual power, i.e. time and position are fixed in operation with respect to the variations. The approach is applied to a holonomic and a simple nonholonomic systems.

A form of equations of motion of a mechanical system in quasi-coordinates

In [3, 4, 5] the form of equations of motion in holonomic coordinates has constructed. The equations obtained give an effective tool for investigating complicated systems. In the present paper the form of equations of motion is written in quasi-coordinates. These equations are solved with respect to quasi-accelerations, which allow to define the motion of a holonomic and nonholonomic systems by a closed set of algebraic – differential equations. The reaction forces of constraints imposed on the system under consideration are calculated by means of a simple algorithm. For illustrating the effectiveness of this form of equations an example is considered.

Multibody Dynamics: A Formulation Using Kane’s Method and Dual Vectors

This paper proposes a formulation based on Kane’s method to form the dynamic equations of motion of multibody systems using dual vectors. Both holonomic and nonholonomic systems are considered in this formulation. An example of a holonomic and a nonholonomic system is worked out in detail using this formulation. This algorithm is shown to be advantageous for a class of holonomic systems which has cylindrical joints.