A Power-Based Perspective of Mechanical Systems

This paper is concerned with the construction of a power-based modeling framework for a large class of mechanical systems. Mathematically this is formalized by proving that every standard mechanical system (with or without dissipation) can be written as a gradient vector field with respect to an indefinite metric. The form and existence of the corresponding potential function is shown to be the mechanical analogue of Brayton and Moser’s mixed-potential function as originally derived for nonlinear electrical networks in the early sixties. In this way, several recently proposed analysis and control methods that use the mixed-potential function as a starting point can also be applied to mechanical systems.