ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the fundamental concepts of planar dynamics. It reviews the dynamics of a single particle based on Newton's laws of motion and then extends it to a system of particles. The dynamic equations of motion for a rigid body are derived that relate the mass and moment of inertia of a body to the forces and moments/torques that act on the body. The chapter provides a review of the reaction forces and torques associated with commonly used planar kinematic joints. The center of mass or the centroid of a body is defined in the same way as that of a system of particles, where the summation over all particles is replaced by an integral over the area of the planar body. The chapter reviews the reaction forces/torques between two typical bodies for several commonly used planar joints. The governing laws of dynamics of individual particles can be extended to systems of interacting particles.
