Miscellaneous Work and Reflections

In my past life as a Cornell undergraduate my mind was almost always being occupied with one mechanics problem or another. They were all esoteric in nature and although I was able to “figure them out” to my own satisfaction, they never amounted to any more than just brain exercises. One such exercise has to do with the moment of inertia for rigid bodies [pdf] and was inspired by a lecture on the topic in TAM 203 – Introduction to Dynamics.

In Fall of my senior year, our TAM 570 – Intermediate Dyamics class was assigned the task of deriving the equations of motion for a rolling (Euler) disk on a flat, no-slip surface using two different methods. I chose the Newton-Euler method and Lagrange’s equations with undetermined multipliers for my analysis. The report also includes a stability analysis and MATLAB code for three-dimensional animation based on any prescribed set of initial conditions. [pdf]

Later, in Spring of my senior year, I won second place in the department's writing contest. It's a discussion on the principle of virtual work, which was a concept that I didn't really grasp when it was introduced in our structural engineering class. [pdf]

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Last Updated August 14, 2006