ON DYNAMICALLY EQUIVALENT FORCE SYSTEMS AND THEIR APPLICATION TO THE BALANCING OF A BROOM OR THE STABILITY OF A SHOE BOX

摘要

The stability of a rigid body on which two forces are in equilibrium can be assessed intuitively. In more complex cases this is no longer true. This paper presents a general method to assess the stability of complex force systems, based on the notion of dynamic equivalence. A resultant force is considered dynamically equivalent to a given system of forces acting on a rigid body if the contributions to the stability of the body of both force systems are equal. It is shown that the dynamically equivalent resultant force of two given constant forces applies at the intersection of its line of action and the circle put up by the application points of the given forces and the intersection of their lines of action. The determination of the combined center of mass can be considered as a special case of this theorem. Two examples are provided that illustrate the significance of the proposed method. The first example considers the suspension of a body, by springs only, that is statically balanced for rotation about a virtual stationary point. The second example treats the roll stability of a ship, where the metacentric height is determined in a natural way.