The calculation of the envelope of a set of related trajectories can provide an interesting supplementary exercies in a course on classical mechanics. An example that is probably familiar to most readers is the envelope of all the possible trajectories of an object projected from a given point with a given speed in a unifrom gravitational field. The envelope of all these parabolic trajectories is itself a parabola;we shall give this as a first example in the cases discussed below.
We shall restrict ourselves to motion in a single plane. If we are using rectangular coordinates,the trajectories of a given family are describable by an equation of the from (00000000000) where (00000000) is a parameter that characterizes the individual trajectories. For a given trajectory,(00000000)is a constant. In the case of projectile motions,for example,(00000000) can be taken to be the angle of projection,(000000),relative to the horizontal.
The envelope of a set of trajectories is, of course, a line tangential to all the individual paths,as shown in Fig.1. It, too,satisfies the equation (0000000) at every point common to it and the individual trajectories because, for appropriate values of x and y, a point on the envelope coincides with a point on a trajectory with some value of (000000).However, the envelope has to satisfy the additional requirement that each trajectory in the family is tangent to it and that it, in turn, is tangent to every trajectory.It follows form this that the envelope must satisfy the auxiliary condition: