Projectile Motion Investigation II

Projectile Motion Investigation II

Another example for investigating projectile motion has been provided by fellow IB teacher Ferenc Beleznay.  Here we fix the velocity and then vary the angle, then to plot the maximum points of the parabolas.  He has created a Geogebra app to show this (shown above).  The locus of these maximum points then form an ellipse.

We can see that the maximum points of the projectiles all go through the dotted elliptical line.  So let’s see if we can derive this equation.

Let’s start with the equations for projectile motion, usually given in parametric form:

Here v is the initial velocity which we will keep constant, theta is the angle of launch which we will vary, and g is the gravitational constant which we will take as 9.81.

We can plot these curves parametrically, and for each given value of theta (the angle of launch) we will create a projectile motion graph.  If we plot lots of these graphs for different thetas together we get something like this:

We now want to see if the maximum points are in any sort of pattern.  In order to find the maximum point we want to find when the gradient of dy/dx is 0.  It’s going to be easier to keep things in parametric form, and use partial differentiation.  We have:

Therefore we find the partial differentiation of both x and y with respect to t.  (This simply means we can pretend theta is a constant).

We can then say that:

We then find when this has a gradient of 0:

We can then substitute this value of t back into the original parametric equations for x:

and also for y:

We now have the parametric equations in terms of theta for the locus of points of the maximum points.  For example, with g= 9.81 and v =1 we have the following parametric equations:

This generates an ellipse (dotted line), which shows the maximum points generated by the parametric equations below (as we vary theta):

And here is the graph:

We can vary the velocity to create a new ellipse.  For example the ellipse generated when v =4 creates the following graph:

So, there we go, we have shown that different ellipses will be created by different velocities.  If you feel like a challenge, see if you can algebraically manipulate the parametric equations for the ellipse into the Cartesian form!