We examine the kinetics of a snowball that is gaining mass while is rolling downhill. This dynamical system combines rotational effects with effects involving the variation of mass. In order to understand the consequences of both effects we compare its behavior with the one of some objects in which such effects are absent, so we compare the snowball with a ball with no mass variation and with a...

We analyze the translational and rotational motion of an ellipsoidal Brownian particle from the viewpoint of stochastic thermodynamics. The particle's Brownian motion is driven by external forces and torques and takes place in an heterogeneous thermal environment where friction coefficients and (local) temperature depend on space and time. Our analysis of the particle's stochastic thermodynamic...

In this paper a new theoretical model is derived, the results of which permit a detailed examination of how the resonant characteristics of a cantilever are influenced by a particle (adsorbate) attached at an arbitrary position along the beam's length. Unlike most previous work, the particle need not be small in mass or dimension relative to the beam, and the adsorbate's geometric characteristi...

Pendulum models have been studied as benchmark problems for development of nonlinear control schemes, as well as reduced-order models for the dynamics analysis of gait, balance and fall for humanoid robots. We have earlier introduced the Reaction Mass Pendulum (RMP), an extension of the traditional inverted pendulum models, that explicitly captures the variable rotational inertia and angular mo...

Inertia amplification is a mechanism coupling degrees of freedom within vibrating structure. Its goal to achieve an apparent high dynamic mass and, accordingly, low resonance frequency. Such structures have been described for use in locally resonant metamaterials and phononic crystals lower the starting frequency band gap without adding system. This study shows that any non-linear kinematic bet...

This paper proposes a nonlinear adaptive position and attitude tracking controller for satellite proximity operations between a target and a chaser satellite. The controller requires no information about the mass and inertia matrix of the chaser satellite, and takes into account the gravitational acceleration, the gravity-gradient torque, the perturbing acceleration due to Earth’s oblateness, a...

The presence of backlash in drivetrains is a major source of limitations as it introduces nonlinearities that reduce their efficiency in speed and position control. Existing models in backlash assume massless shaft, and use only elasticity and damping properties to describe the transmitted torque. This assumption makes them inaccurate since it does not account for the contribution of the body’s...

A surface tension driven micropump harnessing the pressure difference generated by drops of different curvature radii proves to be a simple and attractive passive method to drive fluid flow in microdevices. Here we observed the appearance of backward flow when the initial sizes of the droplets at the inlet and outlet ports are similar. To explain this phenomenon several hypotheses have been inv...

Torsional-space Monte Carlo simulations of flexible molecules are usually based on the assumption that all values of dihedral angles have equal probability in the absence of atomic interactions. In the present paper it is shown that this assumption is not valid. Thermodynamic sampling using dihedral angles or other internal coordinates has to account for both the correct metric in conformationa...