Fundamental properties of the gyroscope oscillation

Abstract

Despite partial solutions by famous scientists during the early Industrial Revolution, gyroscope problems remained unsolvable until the beginning of the twentieth century when several fundamental physical laws were finally formulated to describe them. Today, the principles of classical mechanics enable the formulation and description of the physical processes involved in the rotation of any object. Gyroscopic devices are objects that rotate and exhibit oscillation, which has been a challenging problem in engineering mechanics. The oscillation of a gyroscope is caused by the interaction between external and inertial torques. This is different from other examples of oscillation, such as pendulums and springs, which have been well documented. The main difference in the physics of gyroscopic oscillation is that the spinning rotors of the gyroscopic devices are supported on one side, with their axes perpendicular to the axis of oscillation. The oscillation of gyroscopic devices is interrelated with the potential and kinetic energy of their components. However, the physics of oscillation of such objects has not been fully described in publications until recently. The theory of gyroscopic effects for rotating objects has now been published and provides a solution to this problem. According to this theory, gyroscopic inertial torques represent the potential energy of the external torque and kinetic energy of the spinning rotor. This paper demonstrates the distribution of inertial torques about the axes of Cartesian coordinates, which enables the computation of gyroscope motion and oscillation.