Added mass fluid quasi-momentum. Unsteady forces due to a change of the relative velocity of a body submerged in a fluid can be divided into two parts: the virtual mass effect and the Basset force. The origin of the force is that the fluid will gain kinetic energy at the expense of the work done by an accelerating submerged body. It can be shown that the virtual mass force, for a spherical particle submerged in an inviscid, incompressible fluid is where bold symbols denote vectors, formula_2 is the fluid flow velocity, formula_3 is the spherical particle velocity, formula_4 is the mass density
Variable-mass system to the center of mass of the body, and v is the velocity of the body. In astrodynamics, which deals with the mechanics of rockets, the term "v" is often called the effective exhaust velocity and denoted "v". There are different derivations for the variable-mass system motion equation, depending on whether the mass is entering or leaving a body (in other words, whether the moving body's mass is increasing or decreasing, respectively). To simplify calculations, all bodies are considered as particles. It is also assumed that the mass is unable to apply external forces on the body outside of accretion/ablation