Maruthi R. Akella1, Sofokli Cakalli2
CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.111, No.2, pp. 119-127, 2016, DOI:10.3970/cmes.2016.111.119
Abstract The planar motion of a particle within an arbitrary potential field is considered. The particle is additionally subject to an external force wherein the applied thrust-acceleration is constrained to remain normal to the velocity vector. The system is thus non-conservative but since the thrust force is non-working, the total energy is a conserved quantity. Under this setting, a major result of fundamental importance is established in this paper: that the flight direction angle (more precisely, the sine of the angle between the position and velocity vectors) is shown to always satisfy a linear first-order differential equation with variable coefficients that… More >
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