Principles and simulation of straight boomerang
Nicolás Restrepo · RIT Scholar Works (Rochester Institute of Technology) · 1995
There has been a lot of research done on the regular boomerang but little or none has ever been done on the straight boomerang. This not so popular toy does behave as a boomerang but the physics governing its flight are very different from those governing the regular boomerang's flight. In order to understand what makes the straight boomerang come back, high speed photography was used. It was concluded that the autorotation phenomenon played an important role during the flight. A mathematical model was then developed and the flight dynamics of the boomerang incorporating its actual behavior was simulated using MATLAB. The simulation results obtained were very close to those obtained from experimentation.