MASSA , Enrico

A revisitation of a relativistic continuum Thermodynamics is proposed. A material body is regarded as a binary system, consisting of two interacting subsystems, respectively called the material substratum and the heat subsystem. A detailed analysis of the interactions, as well as of the limitations posed by the second law of Thermodynamics is...

The theory of physical frames of reference in curved space-time is reviewed. The construction of a tensor analysis commuting with the spatial resolution process is discussed. A few applications are examined.

The gauge-theoretical approach to classical mechanics is applied to the study of time-dependent hamiltonian dynamics. The construction of the lagrangian and hamiltonian bundles is revisited. A reformulation of the basic themes of hamiltonian mechanics in the newer scheme is discussed.

In the framework of J-bundles a vielbein formulation of unified Einstein--Maxwell theory is proposed. In the resulting scheme, field equations matching the gravitational and electromagnetic fields are derived by constraining a 5-dimensional variational principle. No dynamical scalar field in involved.

Within the framework of Lagrangian mechanics, the conservativeness of the hydrostatic forces acting on a floating rigid body is proved. The representation of the associated hydrostatic potential is explicitly worked out. The invariance of the resulting Lagrangian with respect to surge, sway and yaw motions is used in connection with the Routh...

A geometric formulation of Classical Analytical Mechanics, especially suited to the study of non-holonomic systems is proposed. The argument involves a preliminary study of the geometry of the space of kinetic states of the system, followed by a revisitation of Chetaev's definition of virtual work, viewed here as a cornerstone for the...

A new variational principle for General Relativity, based on an action functional involving both the metric tensor and the affine connection as independent degrees of freedom is presented. The resulting extremals are seen to be pairs consisting of a Ricci flat metric and of the associated Riemannian connection. An application to Kaluza's theory...

A unified formulation of rigid body dynamics based on Gauss principle is proposed. The Lagrange, Kirchhoff and Newton–Euler equations are seen to arise from different choices of the quasicoordinates in the velocity space. The group-theoretical aspects of the method are discussed.

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A revisitation of the Legendre transformation in the context of affine principal bundles is presented. The argument, merged with the gauge-theoretical considerations developed elsewhere, provides a unified representation of lagrangian and hamiltonian mechanics extending to arbitrary non-autonomous systems the symplectic approach of W.M.Tulczyjew.

A geometrical approach to lagrangian and hamiltonian non-holonomic dynamics is proposed. The construction relies on a revisitation of the Poincaré-Cartan 1-form, leading to the introduction of the concepts of lagrangian and hamiltonian pairs and to the implementation of a non--holonomic Legendre map. The relationship with the standard...

A gauge-invariant formulation of the Legendre transformation in mechanics, extending toarbitrary non-autonomous systems the symplectic approach of W.M.Tulczyjew is presented.