You are on page 1of 2

Moment of Inertia for an isosceles: A Sample Cal-

culation of Two dimensional Integral


Consider an isosceles whose equal sides are of length a and the angle between
them equal to 2. We want to find the moment of inertia about the axis
perpendicular to the triangles plane which passes through the vertex joining
the two equal sides.
Let us recall that for any planar body the moment of inertia is givenby
the formula X
I= ri2 mi
i

where the sum runs over the mass points mi , ri being the distance between
the the mass point and the center of rotation ( about which the moment
of inertia is being calculated ).
If we have a two dimensional object which has an area the above sum
becomes an integral, i.e. Z
I= r2 dm

where we have just replaced the mass of the points by dm and the discrete
sum by a continous sum which is more commonly recognized as integration.
If we have a uniform body, then if the area occupied by the tiny mass dm is
dA = dx dy then we have dm = dA ( is the mass per unit area ): above
formula becomes Z Z
I= (x2 + y 2 ) dx dy (1)

The reason we now have two integrals in that we have sum over all the mass
points which are labelled by their x and y coordinates. Also, the distance
to the mass point is now expressed in terms of x and y, using Pythagoras
theorem. Now this integration can be done in one than one way. Think of
summing the numbers in a two dimensional array. One can sum over the
elements along each vertical array individually and then sum the results so
obtained over the horizontal directions. It should be apparent if we had the
process in the opposite order, i.e. sum horizontally first and then sum over
these results vertically - the result will be the same if it is a finite quantity.
Next we proceed to calculate the moment of inertia of the isosceles about
an axis passing through the vertex where the two equal sides meet and which
is perpendicular to the plane containing the triangle.
Lets adopt a coordinate system as shown in figure 1.
To carry out the integral (1) one has to sum up the values of x2 + y 2
over all the points on the triangle, as that what integration implies. As we
are going to sum ( i.e. integrate ), we first sum along the y direction first
while keeping the x value fixed ( i.e. along a vertical line ) . The maximum
value y according to the shown figure is x tan and its minimum value is
x tan .

1
Thus integrating over y while keeping x fixed - we get the contribution
from vertical
Z  Z x tan Z  1 x tan 
Z
1
2 2
I= dx (x +y )dy = dx (x y+ y 3 )
2
= 2 dx x3 (tan + tan3 )
x tan 3 x tan 3
Thus we have summed over the vertical strips whose contribution is given in
the integrand ( i.e. the function which one has to integrate) . The next step
is to sum over the contributions of each vertical strip , which is basically the
x-integration:
Z a cos
1 1 1
I = 2(tan + tan3 ) dx x3 = (tan + tan3 )(a cos )4
3 0 2 3
1 4
= a (sin2 + 3 cos2 ) sin cos
6
The mass of the plate is M = a2 sin cos .
Thus,
1
I = a2 M (sin2 + 3 cos2 )
6

For an equilateral triangle = 6 which gives
5
I= M a2
12
which is the correct answer.

You might also like