Indefinite Damping in Mechanical Systems and Gyroscopic Stabilization
Wolfhard Kliem
The paper deals with gyroscopic stabilization of unstable linear mechanical systems with positive definite mass and stiffness matrices M and K, respectively, and an indefinite damping matrix D. A stabilization is obtained by adding a suitable skew symmetric gyroscopic matrix G to the damping matrix. After investigating several special cases we find an appropriate solution of the Lyapunov matrix equation for the general case. An example shows the deviation of the stability limit found by the Lyapunov method from the exact value.