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
Angular velocity which shows a connection with the Lie group of rotations. We prove that angular velocity tensor is skew symmetric, i.e. formula_63 satisfies formula_64. A rotation matrix "A" is orthogonal, inverse to its transpose, so we have formula_65. For formula_66 a frame matrix, taking the time derivative of the equation gives: Applying the formula formula_68, Thus, "W" is the negative of its transpose, which implies it is skew symmetric. At any instant formula_70, the angular velocity tensor represents a linear map between the position vector formula_71 and the velocity vectors formula_72 of a point on a rigid body rotating around the