General 3-D Motion

Similarly, the absolute acceleration of A is,

where is Coriolis acceleration.

The Independent Coordinates of a rigid body:

A rigid body with N-particles have 3N degrees of freedom, since each particle has 3 degrees of freedom.

It thus appears that 3N coordinates are needed to specify the body. However, there coordinates are related. Distance between two particle is fixed. One particle is connected to (N-1) particles. Thus, we write (N-1) equations relating the coordinates and distance. Similarly for the second particle we can write (N-2) equations, since the equation relating this and the first particle has already been written. similarly, for third particle we can write (N-3) equations.

Thus, total available equations