Gyrocontinua

We consider a body endowed with the ®ne structure of very many, very small gyroscopes and describe it as a sort of composite (perhaps constrained) Cosserat continuum (gyrocontinuum). The gyroscopes are supposed to interact signi ®cantly with the macroscopic motion of the body via the torques generated by changes of moment of momentum imposed upon them by the macromotion. Thus, we focus essentially on the consequences of constraining the spins to have ®xed intensity about some material axis. We conclude the paper studying how the behaviour of a vibrating beam is a€ected by the special microstructure. A linear discrete gyroelastic body was already considered; (Dʹ Eleuterio, G.M.T., 1984. J. Appl. Mech. 55, 488±489; Dʹ Eleuterio, G.M.T., Hughes, P.C., 1984. J. Appl. Mech. 51, 415±422); we generalise, expand and put their ideas on a ®rm basis