Motion of System of Particles and Rigid Bodies

MOTION OF SYSTEM OF PARTICLES AND RIGID BODIES

INTRODUCTION

Most of the objects that we come across in our day to day life consist of large number of particles. In the previous Units, we studied the motion of bodies without considering their size and shape. So far we have treated even the bulk bodies as only point objects. In this section, we will give importance to the size and shape of the bodies. These bodies are actually made up of a large number of particles. When such a body moves, we consider it as the motion of collection of particles as a whole. We define the concept of center of mass to deal with such a system of particles.

The forces acting on these bulk bodies are classified into internal and external forces. Internal forces are the forces acting among the particles within a system that constitute the body. External forces are the forces acting on the particles of a system from outside. In this unit, we deal with such system of particles which make different rigid bodies. A rigid body is the one which maintains its definite and fixed shape even when an external force acts on it. This means that, the interatomic distances do not change in a rigid body when an external force is applied. However, in real life situation, we have bodies which are not ideally rigid, because the shape and size of the body change when forces act on them. For the rigid bodies we study here, we assume that such deformations are negligible. The deformations produced on non- rigid bodies are studied separately in Unit 7 under elasticity of solids.