Statics › Section E · Rigid body equilibrium › Topic E.1
Degrees of freedom
Before you can hold a body still, you need to know every way it could move. Counting those independent motions, its degrees of freedom, tells you how many restraints it needs and how many equilibrium equations you can write for it.
In this topic
- Why freedom comes first
- What a degree of freedom is
- Rigid bodies in a plane: three
- Rigid bodies in space: six
- Describing a small movement
- Restraints remove freedoms
- Worked example: restraining a plate
- Worked example: a door on its hinges
- One equation per freedom
- Too few, just enough, too many
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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