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
Rigid body dynamics the rigid body. The velocity of the points R along their trajectories are where ω is the angular velocity vector of the body. Work is computed from the dot product of each force with the displacement of its point of contact If the trajectory of a rigid body is defined by a set of generalized coordinates "q", "j" = 1, ..., "m", then the virtual displacements δr are given by The virtual work of this system of forces acting on the body in terms of the generalized coordinates becomes or collecting the coefficients of δq For simplicity consider a trajectory