Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2018) 133: 103
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2018-11924-1

Regular Article

Analysis of projectile motion: A comparative study using fractional operators with power law, exponential decay and Mittag-Leffler kernel

¹ CONACyT-Tecnológico Nacional de México/CENIDET, Interior Internado Palmira S/N, Col. Palmira, C.P. 62490, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
² Tecnológico Nacional de México/CENIDET, Interior Internado Palmira S/N, Col. Palmira, C.P. 62490, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico

^* e-mail: jgomez@cenidet.edu.mx

Received: 12 December 2017
Accepted: 9 February 2018
Published online: 13 March 2018

Abstract

In this paper, the two-dimensional projectile motion was studied; for this study two cases were considered, for the first one, we considered that there is no air resistance and, for the second case, we considered a resisting medium k . The study was carried out by using fractional calculus. The solution to this study was obtained by using fractional operators with power law, exponential decay and Mittag-Leffler kernel in the range of . These operators were considered in the Liouville-Caputo sense to use physical initial conditions with a known physical interpretation. The range and the maximum height of the projectile were obtained using these derivatives. With the aim of exploring the validity of the obtained results, we compared our results with experimental data given in the literature. A multi-objective particle swarm optimization approach was used for generating Pareto-optimal solutions for the parameters k and for different fixed values of velocity v₀ and angle . The results showed some relevant qualitative differences between the use of power law, exponential decay and Mittag-Leffler law.