Stability Analysis of a Rigid Body with Attached Geometrically Nonlinear Rod by the Energy-Momentum Method

This paper applies the energy-momentum method to the problem of nonlinear stability of relative equilibria of a rigid body with attached flexible appendage in a uniformly rotating state. The appendage is modeled as a geometrically exact rod which allows for finite bending, shearing and twist in three dimensions. Application of the energy-momentum method to this example depends crucially on a special choice of variables in terms of which the second variation block diagonalizes into blocks associated with rigid body modes and internal vibration modes respectively. The analysis yields a nonlinear stability result which states that relative equilibria are nonlinearly stable provided that; (i) the angular velocity is bounded above by the square root of the minimum eigenvalue of an associated linear operator and, (ii) the whole assemblage is rotating about the minimum axis of inertia.