As mentioned above, nonconservative systems involving viscous or frictional dissipation, typically result from weak thermal interactions with many nearby atoms, making it impractical to include a comp...As mentioned above, nonconservative systems involving viscous or frictional dissipation, typically result from weak thermal interactions with many nearby atoms, making it impractical to include a complete set of active degrees of freedom. In addition, dissipative systems usually involve complicated dependences on the velocity and surface properties that are best handled by including the dissipative drag force explicitly as a generalized drag force in the Euler-Lagrange equations.
