Instructor: Dr Andrew van Paridon (av568)
TAs: Josephine Monica (jm2684)
Lectures: MWF 9:05am - 9:55am. Room Thurston Hall 205.
Office Hours: These will be held in person, initially 3 times a week. Room Upson 447. Take the survey here to set your preferences.

Andrew van Paridon: Thurs 11a-12p, and 2:30-3:30p.
Josephine Monica : Wed 12-2, Fri 1-3p

Work together? I encourage you to work on your own problems first, and then work together to develop the answers to solutions. Sharing perspectives on problems is a great pathway to developing new intuitions. There are also endless hints to find in Matlab, no one person will ever have the perfect code.

Questions or comments? Post them on Ed Discussion. You would be surprised how many people also have your seemingly unique and obscure question. You can post anonymously, if appropriate. Use email for emergencies.

Prerequisites:

MATH 2940 (Linear Algebra for Engineers), or equivalent.
MAE 2030 is STRONGLY advised, but not necessary if you have sufficient equivalent background. Please speak with Dr van Paridon for permission.
MATLAB. You need to be comfortable with Matlab already, or get up to speed quickly. The MatLab Academy website provides the Matlab Onramp. Further resources are available from Cornell's collection of learning modules.
System Dynamics, MAE 3260, is not a prerequisite nor a corequisite for this class, it is listed to indicate a general level of mathematical sophistication.

Homework Due Fridays, at 6pm.

Course Components and Grades.

Exams, 60%. Prelims will be take home, and the final exam will be in person. The total distribution of points is 15/20/25
- Prelims:
  - 1) Available Wednesday 10/6 @ 3pm. Due by Thursday 10/7 9pm. 90 min to complete + 30min to submit. (15%)
  - 2) Available Monday 11/15 @ 12pm. Due by Tuesday 11/16 12am (midnight). 120 min to complete + 30min to submit. (20%)
- Final exam:
  - Will be held on Thursday 12/16 @ 2pm in Upson 216. Written exam. 120min in length. Closed book, but allowed one page of handwritten notes, double-sided A4.

Final Project (20%) Go here for details on Final Project Due Friday December 10th.
Homework (20%): (equally weighted. graded on effort. lowest homework score will be dropped)

The median student, in both courses, will get a B or a B+ (to be determined).

If we perceive that you have attended every lecture, taken all exams without giving up, do the final project, and spend at least 6 hours each week doing HW you are guaranteed a grade of at least B-. If you can do all of the homework yourself, without help, you will probably get a B+ or better. If, additionally, you can reproduce all of the theory from the lectures and extend it slightly, you will probably get at least an A.

Homework

Homework will usually be due Fridays at 6:00 pm. The homework will constitute both written work, which will need to be submitted via Gradescope, and Matlab scripts that will be submitted via the respective Matlab Grader, within Canvas. The combined submission each week will be graded on effort and completeness. The score each week might be different, for instance, Week 7 might have 5 questions, and Week 8 might have 3, but the percentage completion each week is what matters, and each week will be weighted equally.

Your lowest 2 grades from homework will be dropped. This is your allowance for sickness and other disruptions, you shouldn't be trying to miss submissions tactically. Rather, make sure you attempt everything, and then if something happens, you have a spares.

Suggested Reading

There is no single book that covers this course material.
Matlab. Within the first month or so you should know everything in the Statics and Dynamics book by Ruina and Pratap. When you have mastered that, you know useful things. And if you don't master it, you will be at a disadvantage. Here are some MATLAB examples. Some more examples from Sophomore Dynamics'
Rajesh Bhaskaran Tutorial for Cornell Engineering Students (NOTE These examples are now a few years old. Beware older versions of Matlab had slightly different syntax. If you find a problem/correction, please post to Ed Discussion)
Any book on Dynamics at a higher level than Ruina and Pratap (above), e.g.
1986_Beatty_Kinematics.pdf 2006_Beatty_Dynamics.pdf. Books by Beatty are the best/closest I have found.
Greenwood is closest in philosophy, but its organization is imperfect and it does not emphasize numerical solutions.
Synge & Griffith (pdf),  a classic great book, not computational. This was Andy's book when he took dynamics as an undergraduate.
Bernstein (pdf), brand new, mathematically precise. Dennis was a co-student, with Andy, in linear algebra as an undergraduate.
O'Reilly, Oliver O'Reilly is now a Berkeley prof. But he first learned dynamics in an earlier version of this very course.
Moon, Francis "Frank" Moon taught this course for many years.
A. Rao,   Anil Rao first learned dynamics in 2030 from Andy at Cornell.
Meirovitch,
etc,..
An explanation of the moment of inertia tensor https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-07-dynamics-fall-2009/lecture-notes/MIT16_07F09_Lec26.pdf

Course Schedule.pdf

Videos

Youtube has developed an amazing number of videos that explain many facets of dynamics with some fantastic animations. Where possible, you will be directed to these video by the instructor. If you find anything that is particularly useful, I would encourage you post it to Ed Discussion BUT FIRST send it to either Dr van Paridon or Josephine for validation. Multiple interpretations can be useful, but we DO NOT want to add to confusion by introducing topics outside the scope of this course.

Additional Resources

There are solutions for the homework problems assigned in previous versions of the course. These solutions were written by the students who took the course before and are by no means perfect. Notes from the instructor will be posted after class. There are also notes from previous semesters as well.

What was the course like in the past? Andy Ruina has previously taught this course and there are mountains of notes and examples in his course pages.

Fall 2012 4735/5735
Fall 2014 4730/5730
Fall 2015 4730/5730
Fall 2016 4730/5730
Fall 2017 4730/5730
Fall 2018 4730/5730