I guess next I should explain how we account for non-conservative forces. Essentially we replace the 0 in Equations (??) with the generalized force Qi. It is defined as:
Qi=j=1∑mFj⋅∂qi∂rj.(1) Where Fj represents the vector of the jth non-conservative force we wish to account for in our equations of motion. As you can see by the summation bounds, we have m non-conservative forces we wish to account for. rj is the position vector for force j. Fj⋅∂qi∂rj denotes the dot product between Fj and ∂qi∂rj. Alternatively, to calculate Qi we can use velocities instead of positions:
Qi=j=1∑mFj⋅∂q˙i∂r˙j.(2) r˙j is the time derivative of the position vector (that is, the velocity vector) for force j. Hence the more generalized form of Equations (??) is:
dtd∂q˙i∂L−∂qi∂L=j=1∑mFj⋅∂qi∂rj,i∈{1,2,3,...,n}.(3) The velocity-based definition of Qi can also be used, which yields:
dtd∂q˙i∂L−∂qi∂L=j=1∑mFj⋅∂q˙i∂r˙j,i∈{1,2,3,...,n}.(4)