Moment of inertia is diagonal and torques around the axes act independently of each other. When a body is free to rotate around an axis, torque must be applied to change its angular momentum. The amount of torque needed to cause any given angular acceleration (the rate of change in angular velocity) is proportional to the moment of inertia of the body. Moment of inertia may be expressed in units of kilogram meter squared (kg·m) in SI units and pound-foot-second squared (lbf·ft·s) in imperial or US units. Moment of inertia plays the role in rotational kinetics that mass (inertia) plays in linear kinetics
Linear density unit of mass, formula_9, is equal to the product of its linear mass density, formula_10, and the infinitesimal unit of length, formula_11: The linear mass density can then be understood as the derivative of the mass function with respect to the one dimension of the rod (the position along its length formula_13) The SI unit of linear mass density is the kilogram per meter (kg/m). Linear density of fibers and yarns can be measured by many methods. The simplest one is to measure a length of material and weigh it. However, this requires a large sample and masks the variability