Dynamics and Stability

This course will the student provide a background in advanced methods of dynamics and their application to relevant problems in aerospace engineering. The course is given in lecture form, and includes various elaborated example problems relevant for aerospace engineering.

Every module provides the lecture slides, one or more sample problems and several homework exercises. These recommended exercises and hints can be found together with the sample problems in the exercises section.

The purpose of this course is to provide a background in the advanced methods of mechanics and their application to phenomena relevant to aerospace engineering.

Course content: Principles of dynamics: Newton’s laws, motion with respect to non-inertial reference frames, fictitious forces, conservative systems, phase portraits, virtual work. Lagrangian dynamics: Generalised coordinates, constraints, generalised momenta, generalised forces, Lagrange equations of motion, Lagrangian function, conservative and dissipative systems, constraint forces, Lagrange multipliers, integrals of motion, Jacobi energy function, ignorable coordinates, steady motion. Stability: Definitions, stability of linearised systems, application to general problems and steady motion. Variational analysis: Extrema of integral functionals, Euler-Lagrange equation, essential and natural boundary conditions, Hamilton’s principle. Dynamics of rotating bodies: Kinematics, inertia tensor, Euler’s equations of motion, moment-free motion, Euler angles, gyrodynamics, steady precession.

 

Read more
Creative Commons License
Dynamics and Stability by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/dynamics-and-stability/.
Back to top