Trajectory of a baseball and its characters under the influence of a drag force and the magnus effect

Haiduke Sarafian

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

A flying baseball in the air not only is subject to gravity's pull it is also subject to air resistance. A spinning ball in addition to these two forces experiences a spin-dependent force. The description of motion of a baseball subject to these three forces for a projectile confined to trajectories in a 2D vertical plane is a set of two coupled nonlinear ODEs. The speed dependent drag coefficient makes these equations highly nonlinear. These equations for certain cases are solved numerically by applying a 4rth-order Runge-Kutta code written in either the FORTRAN or the C++ languages. In this article we show by deploying Mathematica one may easily bypass the explicit need of composing such cumbersome computer codes. Moreover, by utilizing Mathematica's integrated numeric and graphic features the author reveals features of a flying ball that to-date have not been reported in scientific literature.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2011 International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2011
Pages51-59
Number of pages9
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 5 2011
Event11th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2011 - Santander, Spain
Duration: Jun 20 2011Jun 23 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2011 International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2011

Other

Other11th International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, ICCSA 2011
Country/TerritorySpain
CitySantander
Period6/20/116/23/11

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications

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