A new trifilar pendulum approach to identify all inertia parameters of a rigid body or assembly

An improved approach is presented for using a trifilar pendulum to identify 10 inertia parameters of odd-shaped bodies. The parameters include the mass, the coordinates of the center of gravity, and the moments and products of inertia. Owing to carefully designed procedures of distance measurement and coordinate transform, no angular measurement is necessary for orientation description in the new approach. Balancing weights and load cells are introduced to facilitate the adjustments of the location and orientation of the body during tests. In order to evaluate the precision of the identified results, tentative error indices are suggested for the parameters, respectively. Two examples are given to demonstrate the new approach.