Cfrgtkky

I am trying to determine the coefficient q in the parametrization of a epicycloid which gives me the arc length of 4.25. The parametrization can be glimpsed in my attempt of a solution in the following Matlab code.

R=0.5;

r=R/3;

c=(R+r)/r;

t = 0:0.01:2*pi;





fun = @(t,q) sqrt((c.^2).*(r.^2).*sin(t).^2+(c.^2).*(q.^2).*...

     (r.^2).*sin(c.*t).^2+(c.^2).*(r.^2).*cos(t).^2+(c.^2).*(q.^2).*...

     (r.^2).*cos(c.*t).^2+1);



fun2 = @(q) integral(@(t) fun(t,q),0,2*pi)



qsolve=fsolve(@(q) fun2(q)-4.25, 0)

The problem is that solve can not find any solution. I am very much grateful if someone can help me with this one.

Cheers!

If you actually evaluate the function you're trying to mess with, suing something like this:

x = -8:.01:8; 

s = numel(x); 

y = zeros(s, 1); 



for i = 1:s

  y(i) = fun2(x(i));

end



plot(x, y); 

then your resulting plot looks like this:

That plot pretty much tells you why you can't make the length be $4.25$ ... because it's pretty much always at least $6$ or $7$.

Perhaps you need to draw a picture of one of your epicycloids to figure out just how short it could possible be. Perhaps the choice $q = 0$ would be a good one, since it seems to be as short as possible. I'll bet it's a circle with radius 1, hence circumference $2pi approx 6.28 > 4.25$.

Here is a plot (obtained by a Matlab program I have placed at the bottom of this text) of various curves with parametric equations as you have given them in a comment :

$$x= cr cos(t) - qr cos(ct), y= cr sin(t) - qr sin(ct)$$

for $q$ in the range $(0,3)$. Value $q=1$ corresponds to the classical epicycloid . For this value of $q$, the curve length is well under $4.25$.

Values of $q$ above $1$ yield curves with loops. Do you still consider such curves ?

I see at least two problems.

Do we agree that arc length is computed as $int_0^L sqrt{x(s)'^2+y(s)'^2}ds$ where $s$ is arclength ?

1) If we assume for a while that your parameter $t$ is arclength (which is not), I am unable to recognize the (square of the) derivative of $x(t) = c*r*cos(t) - q*r*cos(c* t)$ in your "fun" expression. The same for the derivative of $y(t)$.

2) As said above, the issue is that $t$ isn't arc length...

Matlab program for the figure :

clear all;close all;axis equal;hold on;set(gcf,'color','w')

R = 0.5; r = R/3; c = (R+r)/r;

t=0:0.001:2*pi;

plot(c*r*cos(t), c*r*sin(t),'r','linesmoothing','on');

for q=0.1:0.1:3

   x= c*r*cos(t) - q*r*cos(c*t);

   y= c*r*sin(t) - q*r*sin(c*t) ;

   plot(x,y,'b','linesmoothing','on');

end;