D'Alembert's Principle

D'Alembert's principle, also known as the Lagrange–d'Alembert principle, is a statement of the fundamental classical laws of motion. It is named after its discoverer, the French physicist and mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert. The principle states that the sum of the differences between the forces acting on a system of mass particles and the time derivatives of the momenta of the system itself along any virtual displacement consistent with the constraints of the system, is zero. Thus, in symbols d'Alembert's principle is written as following,

where

	is an integer used to indicate (via subscript) a variable corresponding to a particular particle in the system,
	is the total applied force (excluding constraint forces) on the -th particle,
	is the mass of the -th particle,
	is the acceleration of the -th particle,
	together as product represents the time derivative of the momentum of the -th particle, and
	is the virtual displacement of the -th particle, consistent with the constraints.

It is the dynamic analogue to the principle of virtual work for applied forces in a static system and in fact is more general than Hamilton's principle, avoiding restriction to holonomic systems. A holonomic constraint depends only on the coordinates and time. It does not depend on the velocities. If the negative terms in accelerations are recognized as inertial forces, the statement of d'Alembert's principle becomes The total virtual work of the impressed forces plus the inertial forces vanishes for reversible displacements.

This above equation is often called d'Alembert's principle, but it was first written in this variational form by Joseph Louis Lagrange. D'Alembert's contribution was to demonstrate that in the totality of a dynamic system the forces of constraint vanish. That is to say that the generalized forces need not include constraint forces.