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Moment of Inertia Tensor

1) The moment of inertia tensor describes the rotational inertia of a rigid body rotating about an axis through its origin. 2) It is represented by a 3x3 matrix whose elements are the moments of inertia about each principal axis and products of inertia. 3) The angular momentum of the rigid body can be expressed as a matrix equation multiplying the moment of inertia tensor and angular velocity vectors.

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Ahmad Bilal Sabawoon
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297 views

Moment of Inertia Tensor

1) The moment of inertia tensor describes the rotational inertia of a rigid body rotating about an axis through its origin. 2) It is represented by a 3x3 matrix whose elements are the moments of inertia about each principal axis and products of inertia. 3) The angular momentum of the rigid body can be expressed as a matrix equation multiplying the moment of inertia tensor and angular velocity vectors.

Uploaded by

Ahmad Bilal Sabawoon
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Moment of Inertia Tensor

Consider a rigid body rotating with fixed angular velocity about an axis which

passes through the origin--see Figure 28. Let be the position vector of the th

mass element, whose mass is . We expect this position vector to precess about
the axis of rotation (which is parallel to ) with angular velocity . It, therefore,
follows from Equation (A.1309) that
(457)

Thus, the above equation specifies the velocity, , of each mass


element as the body rotates with fixed angular velocity about an axis passing
through the origin.

Figure 28: A rigid rotating body.

The total angular momentum of the body (about the origin) is written

(458
)

where use has been made of Equation (457), and some standard vector identities
(see Section A.10). The above formula can be written as a matrix equation of the
form
(459)

where

(460)

(461)

(462)

(463)

(464)

(465)

Here, is called the moment of inertia about the -axis, the moment of

inertia about the -axis, the product of inertia, the product of

inertia, etc. The matrix of the values is known as the moment of inertia tensor.
Note that each component of the moment of inertia tensor can be written as
either a sum over separate mass elements, or as an integral over infinitesimal mass

elements. In the integrals, , where is the mass density, and a


volume element. Equation (459) can be written more succinctly as
(466)
Here, it is understood that and are both column vectors, and is

the matrix of the values. Note that is a real

symmetric matrix: i.e., and .

In general, the angular momentum vector, , obtained from Equation (466), points
in a different direction to the angular velocity vector, . In other words, is
generally not parallel to .

Finally, although the above results were obtained assuming a fixed angular
velocity, they remain valid at each instant in time if the angular velocity varies.

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