The Attitude Stability Analysis of a Rigid Body with Multi-Elastic Appendages and Multi-Liquid-Filled Cavities Using the Chetaev Method

The stability problem of steady motion of a rigid body with multi-elastic appendages and multi-liquid-filled cavities, in the presence of no external forces or torque, is considered in this paper. The flexible appendages are modeled as the clamped-free-free-free rectangular plates, or/and as the discrete mass-spring sub-system. The motion of liquid in every single ellipsoidal cavity is modeled as the uniform vortex motion with a finite number of degrees of freedom. Assuming that stationary holonomic constraints imposed on the body allow its rotation about a spatially fixed axis, the equation of motion for such a systematic configuration can be very complex. It consists of a set of ordinary differential equations for the motion of the rigid body, the uniform rotation of the contained liquids, the motion of discrete elastic parts, and a set of partial differential equations for the elastic appendages supplemented by appropriate initial and boundary conditions. In addition, for such a hybrid system, under suitable assumptions, their equations of motion have four types of first integrals, i.e., energy and area, Helmholtz' constancy of liquid-vortexes, and the constant of the Poisson equation of motion. Chetaev's effective method for constructing Liapunov functions in the form of a set of first integrals of the equations of the perturbed motion is employed to investigate the sufficient stability conditions of steady motions of the complete system in the sense of Liapunov, i.e., with respect to the variables determining the motion of the solid body and to some quantities which define integrally the motion of flexible appendages. These sufficient conditions take into account the vortexes of the contained liquids, the vibration of the flexible components, and the coupling among the liquid-elasticity-solid