Shape of a Roller Coaster for the Minimum Time of Travel

by Stacy Kam

Submitted : Spring 2014

For this project, the shape of a parabola was predicted so that a roller coaster could travel through it in the minimum amount of time. Derivation of fundamental physic formulas and the Euler’s Method were used to predict the shape of said parabola. It can be concluded that the Euler’s Method, although not equal to, certainly withdrew a similar shape to the concrete roller coaster as well as provided extra data such as the velocity and position of the roller coaster every 0.001 seconds.

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