Welcome to ME 5180 - Dynamics

Welcome to ME 5180 - Dynamics

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Newton: always hasbeen

Dynamics is the study of how things move and interact. It sets the foundation for almost every Mechanical engineering discipline: solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, controls, vibrations, etc. We are limiting our study to classical mechanics.

We have four conditions for classical mechanics:

  1. mass of objects is constant

  2. mass of objects >> mass of atomic particles

  3. velocity << speed of light

  4. time is short (less than millenia) and mass is small (less than the sun or black holes)

Note: We won’t consider quantum effects like wave-particle duality or relativistic effects.

This course derives equations of motion for multibody systems using kinematics and kinetics. Kinematics is the study of the geometry of motion. Kinetics is the study of forces, impacts, and energy on objects. Your goal is to build general equations of motion using Lagrange equations. We will build the foundation for more advanced rigid body dynamic software in Python.

Course Calendar is in the syllabus schedule