Intermediate Dynamics for Engineers

Oliver M. O'Reilly is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is the author of several textbooks, has co-authored over 100 papers in archival journals, and is the recipient of multiple teaching awards including a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley.

• Part I. A Single Particle: 1. Kinematics of a particle; 2. Kinetics of a particle; 3. Lagrange's equations of motion for a single particle; Part II. A System of Particles: 4. Equations of motion for a system of particles; 5. Dynamics of systems of particles; Part III. A Single Rigid Body: 6. Representations of rotations; 7. Kinematics of rigid bodies; 8. Constraints on and potential energies for a rigid body; 9. Kinetics of a rigid body; 10. Lagrange's equations of motion for a single rigid body; Part IV. Systems of Particles and Rigid Bodies: 11. Dynamics of systems of particles and rigid bodies.

'This book is unusual amongst dynamics books in that it treats rotation as an operator, a tensor, which acts on vectors. The more common approach in other books is to treat rotation, indirectly, as a matrix used for a change of coordinates. O'Reilly's rotation-is-a-tensor approach is common in continuum mechanics and is, I think, simply better. It allows direct derivation of the various component formulas without notational tricks.' Andy Ruina, Cornell University