Virtual work

Virtual work arises in the application of the principle of least action to the study of forces and movement of a mechanical system. The work of a force acting on a particle as it moves along a displacement will be different for different displacements. Among all the possible displacements that a particle may follow, called virtual displacements, one will minimize the action. This displacement is therefore the displacement followed by the particle according to the principle of least action. The work of a force on a particle along a virtual displacement is known as the virtual work.

Historically, virtual work and the associated calculus of variations were formulated to analyze systems of rigid bodies, but they have also been developed for the study of the mechanics of deformable bodies.

The principle of virtual work had always been used in some form since antiquity in the study of statics. It was used by the Greeks, medieval Arabs and Latins, and Renaissance Italians. The idea of virtual work was invoked by many notable physicists of the 17th century, such as Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Wallis, and Huygens, in varying degrees of generality, when solving problems in statics. Working with Leibnizian concepts, Johann Bernoulli systematized the virtual work principle and made explicit the concept of infinitesimal displacement. He was able to solve problems for both rigid bodies as well as fluids. Bernoulli's version of virtual work law appeared in his letter to Pierre Varignon in 1715, which was later published in Varignon's second volume of Nouvelle mécanique ou Statique in 1725. This formulation of the principle is today known as the principle of virtual velocities and is commonly considered as the prototype of the contemporary virtual work principles. In 1743 D'Alembert published his Traite de Dynamique where he applied the principle of virtual work, based on the Bernoulli's work, to solve various problems in dynamics. His idea was to convert a dynamical problem into static problem by introducing inertial force. In 1768, Lagrange presented the virtual work principle in a more efficient form by introducing generalized coordinates and presented it as an alternative principle of mechanics by which all problems of equilibrium could be solved. A systematic exposition of Lagrange's program of applying this approach to all of mechanics, both static and dynamic, essentially the D'Alembert's principle, was given in his Méchanique Analitique of 1788. Although Lagrange had presented his version of least action principle prior to this work, he recognized the virtual work principle to be more fundamental mainly because it could be assumed alone as the foundation for all mechanics, unlike the modern understanding that least action does not account for non-conservative forces.

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