SummaryThe problem of maximising the range of a given unpowered, air-launched vehicle is formed as one of Mayer type in the calculus of variations. Eulers’ necessary conditions for the existence of an extremal are stated together with the natural end conditions. The problem reduces to finding the incidence programme which will give the greatest range.The vehicle is assumed to be an air-to-ground, winged unpowered vehicle flying in an isothermal atmosphere above a flat earth. It is also assumed to be a point mass acted upon by the forces of lift, drag and weight. The acceleration due to gravity is assumed constant.The fundamental constraints of the problem and the Euler-Lagrange equations are programmed for an automatic digital computer. By considering the Lagrange multipliers involved in the problem a method of search is devised based on finding flight paths with maximum range for specified final velocities. It is shown that this method leads to trajectories which are sufficiently close to the “best” trajectory for most practical purposes.It is concluded that such a method is practical and is particularly useful in obtaining the optimum incidence programme during the initial portion of the flight path.
Explicit determination of piezoelectric Eshelby tensors for a spheroidal inclusion
