Discrete Formulation for the dynamics of rods deforming in space

Abstract: We describe the main ingredients needed to create, from the smooth lagrangian density, a variational principle for discrete motions of a discrete rod, with corresponding conserved Noether currents. We describe all geometrical objects in terms of elements on the linear Atiyah bundle, using a reduced forward difference operator. We show how this introduces a discrete lagrangian density that models the discrete dynamics of a discrete rod. The presented tools are general enough to represent a discretization of any variational theory in principal bundles, and its simplicity allows to perform an iterative integration algorithm to compute the discrete rod evolution in time, starting from any predefined configurations of all discrete rod elements at initial times.