Discrete Moser-Veselov Integrators for Spatial and Body Representations of Rigid Body Motions

The body and spatial representations of rigid body motion correspond, respectively, to the convective and spatial representations of continuum dynamics. With a view to developing a unified computational approach for both types of problems, the discrete Clebsch approach of Cotter and Holm for continuum mechanics is applied to derive (i) body and spatial representations of discrete time models of various rigid body motions and (ii) the discrete momentum maps associated with symmetry reduction for these motions. For these problems, this paper shows that the discrete Clebsch approach yields a known class of explicit variational integrators, called discrete Moser-Veselov (DMV) integrators. The spatial representation of DMV integrators are Poisson with respect to a Lie-Poisson bracket for the semi-direct product Lie algebra. Numerical results are presented which confirm the conservative properties and accuracy of the numerical solutions.