Friday, November 24, 2017

lagrangian formalism - Constraints in classical mechanics


I am self-studying classical mechanics and I have a couple of questions about constraints. Goldstein in his book Classical Mechanics writes in the beginning of Section 1.3 that:



It is an overly simplified view to think that all problems in mechanics are reduced to solving the set of differential equations: mi¨ri = F(e)i+jFji

where F(e)i denotes the net external force on particle i and Fji denotes the force exerted by particle j on i because one may need to take into account the necessary constraints for the system.




Then, he says that the constraints introduce two types of difficulties in solving mechanical problems:


(I) ri are no longer independent.


(II) constraint forces are not known in general.


My questions are:


(1) IF it is possible to identify all the constraint forces, then all the problems would be reduced to solving (), where F(e)i includes all the constraints forces. Wouldn't it? If not, is there a constraint that cannot be translated into a corresponding constraint force?


(2) Isn't (II) in fact the only difficulty with solving mechanical problems? It seems to me that (I) is not a "difficulty" because provided we can identify all the constraint forces the fact that ri are not independent would be incorporated into the constraint forces that would appear in the equations of motion. Isn't the fact that ri are not independent nothing but that the equations of motion are coupled ODEs?




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