Minimum and terminal velocities in projectile motion

• Autor(a) principal: Miranda,E.N.
• Data de Publicação: 2004
• Outros Autores: Nikolskaya,S., Riba,R.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista Brasileira de Ensino de Física (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172004000200007
• topic: projectile motion; drag force; Euler equation; terminal velocity

The motion of a projectile with horizontal initial velocity V0, moving under the action of the gravitational field and a drag force is studied analytically. As it is well known, the projectile reaches a terminal velocity Vterm. There is a curious result concerning the minimum speed Vmin; it turns out that the minimum velocity is lower than the terminal one if V0 > Vterm and is lower than the initial one if V0 < Vterm. These results show that the velocity is not a monotonous function. If the initial speed is not horizontal, there is an angle range where the velocity shows the same behavior mentioned previously. Out of that range, the velocity is a monotonous function. These results comes out from numerical simulations.