“…The classical theory of the finite motion of the thin rods was developed by Kirchhoff about 150 years ago, presented in detail by Love (1927), and recently reviewed by Dill (1992). While there are a large number of investigations dealing with the motion of perfectly flexible strings (for example, Carrier, 1945;Harrison, 1948;Oplinger, 1960;Murthy and Ramakrishna, 1965;Narasimha, 1968;Miles, 1984;O'Reilly and Holmes, 1992;Nayfeh et al, 1995;Lin and Ravi-Chandar, 2006), relatively little work has been done on the motion of filaments with non-negligible bending stiffness. Tabor (1997a,b,c, 2000) studied the nonlinear dynamics of the filaments based on the Kirchhoff's rod equations in a series of papers: they studied the stability of various stationary solutions, such as planar ring and straight rod, subject to twisting perturbations.…”