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25.0000
20.0000
15.0000
Y-Position (m)
10.0000
5.0000
0.0000
0.0000 10.0000 20.0000 30.0000 40.0000 50.0000 60.0000 70.0000 80.0000 90.0000 100.0000
-5.0000
X-Position (m)
Plot Scaling
100
25
Delay = 0.1
Page 3
Sample Data for Alternative Projectiles
DISCLAIMER
The author shall not be responsible for losses of any kind
resulting from the use of the program or of any documentation
and can in no way provide compensation for any losses sustained
including but not limited to any obligation, liability, right,
or remedy for tort nor any business expense, machine downtime
or damages caused to the user by any deficiency, defect or
error in the program or in any such documentation or any
malfunction of the program or for any incidental or consequential
losses, damages or costs, however caused.
Page 5
Tech Details (1)
If we are willing to ignore the effect of drag on the projectile, the equations that govern the flight
of a simple, spherical projectile simplify greatly - to the point thaqt we don’t even need a computer to
solve them. But a computer or even a graphing calculator does provide a convenient means of visualizing
the solution.
For those cases involving uniform acceleration (which it will be shown later is appropriate when
air drag is neglected), the distance traveled is simply the average velocity times the elapsed time:
The acceleration is the change in velocity over the elapsed time (and is assumed uniform here):
Page 6
Tech Details (1)
rn the flight
puter to
f visualizing
priate when
me:
):
Time 2
Page 7
Tech Details (2)
In order to determine the trajectory of our idealized spherical projectile, we’ll apply Newton’s
Second Law:
F ma
that is, the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration. We’ll include the force due to gravity here,
that is, the weight, but will ignore air drag for now. Forces and velocities are both vector quantities, that
is, they have both magn itude and direction. (The state trooper is interested in your speed, which is the
magnitude of your velocity, but if you are trying to get somewhere in particular, your velocity is key.)
We’ll resolve forces (and accelerations and velocities) into components in the x (horizontal) and y
(vertical) directions and apply Newton’s 2 nd law separately to each.
Since we have ignored air drag, there are no forces in the x (horizontal direction), thus the
horizontal acceleration is identically 0.0. That means the horizontal velocity (U) will be constant and
equal to the initial value Uinitial . The horizontal position is then given by:
F y ma y mg ,
that is, the acceleration in the vertical direction is equal to -g (9.8 m/s 2 in the metric system, 32.2 ft/s2 in
the English system. With this uniform acceleration, the vertical velocity (V) is then given by:
V Vinitial g x Time
.
The initial velocity components specified in these equations can be found from simple trigonometry:
The equations for X and Y are easily input to a graphing calculator in this parametric form so that the
trajectory can be visualized as a function of time, launch velocity (Velocityinitial ) and launch angle
(Angle initial ).
Page 8
Tech Details (2)
y Newton’s
avity here,
ntities, that
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Page 9
Tech Details (3)
The model of projectile motion developed on the previous sheet, while convenient for
implementation on a graphing calculator, has some obvious problems. Air drag was ignored and as a
consequence, we found that contrary to intuition, the horizontal velocity stays at its initial value and
never decreases. Furthermore, the vertical velocity just keeps getting more and more negative (heading
downward) with time; that is, it never reaches a terminal velocity. To rectify this problem we must
include the force due to the drag of the air on the spherical projectile. Our experience tells us that drag
will be more important for a light sphere, e.g., a beach ball, and less so for heavy projectiles like a shot
put.
The air drag model and the solution algorithm implemented in this spreadsheet are fully
explained in An Introduction to Computational Fluid Dynamics by C.Y. Chow, (Wiley, 1979). Only a
few highlights are presented here. First of all, this is a 2-D model only - no hooks, slices or curveballs
allowed. The drag force depends on the velocity of the projectile relative to the wind, which is assumed
to have only a horizontal component and acts opposite to the relative wind. Experimental data for the
drag coefficient of a smooth sphere are used. This function Cdrag implements curve fits for this data.
The accelerations in the x and y directions at each point in time are computed in the functions FXoverM
and FYoverM, respectively. Unfortunately with the extra terms involving the air drag, the two
governing equations can’t be solved directly (they are a set of two non-linear, ordinary differential
equations). So we use a numerical technique called Runge-Kutta integration which has been
implemented in the subroutine Kutta. All the heavy-duty calculations (the functions Cdrag, FxoverM,
FyoverM and the subroutine Kutta) were all implemented behind-the-scenes in Visual Basic for
Applications and are automatically invoked when the user hits the Compute/Plot button on the main sheet.
In addition to the main sheet, which includes boxes for user input and shows the trajectory
graph ically, another sheet reports the computed x and y positions and the horizontal (u) and vertical (v)
velocity components as a function of time. Another sheet gives some approximate data for various
common spherical projectiles which the user may want to test.
Page 10
Tech Details (3)
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Page 11