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 on a body (F = 0) the variable-mass system motion equation reduces to If the velocity of the ejected propellant, v, is assumed have the opposite direction as the rocket's acceleration, dv/d"t", the scalar equivalent of this equation can be written as from which d"t" can be canceled out to give Integration by separation of variables gives By rearranging and letting Δ"v" = "v" - "v", one arrives at the standard form of the ideal rocket equation: where "m" is the initial total mass, including propellant, "m" is the final total mass, "v" is the effective exhaust velocity (often denoted