DESIGNING YACHTS FOR THE AMERICA’S CUP

DESIGNING YACHTS FOR THE AMERICA’S CUP

We are back with Part 2 of the Next Generation Design podcast. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Max Starr from INEOS Team UK, a CFD engineer working on the yacht competing in the America’s Cup championship.

So what exactly is the America’s Cup? The America’s Cup actually dates back to 1851. The first race was held around the Isle of Wight in England, when the Americans challenged the British. That same year, the Great Exhibition took place in London.

At that time, the Americans declared, “We build the fastest boats in the world,” to which the British replied, “No, you don’t. Prove it to us.” This made for a fascinating challenge, as legal documentation effectively established the rules of competition from that very first challenge. The defending nation has the right to define how the next challenge will be conducted.

With this type of evolution, flexibility in design and effective collaboration are absolutely critical.

“Our computational models are very complex and run quite fast, and neural networks help us understand how the boat will react under different conditions. This becomes especially complex when you start doing things like sailing on the water’s surface, because everything begins in ‘displacement mode,’ where the boat is moving through the water.

Then, you want to get the boat going as fast as possible because once you’re up on the foils—on the hydrofoils—the drag is at its lowest. That’s how you achieve the highest speeds. When the boat is in the water, you struggle to reach truly high speeds because so much focus is placed on the hull.

When the boat lifts out of the water, it can travel three to four times the wind speed because you’ve significantly reduced the drag acting on the hull, while still generating plenty of force through the sails.

As a result, you almost need an entirely new computational model for the moment when the boat is flying, compared to when it is in the water, because the response and dynamics of the boat in these two states are completely different. This means the digital twin requires an entirely new, highly complex model to be added.”

— Dr. Max Starr, INEOS Team UK – Analysis & Simulation Group —

One challenge no team anticipated—beyond attempting to design an entirely new boat from scratch for this year’s America’s Cup—was the global pandemic. Although handled differently from country to country, it undeniably impacted all teams in unexpected ways.

How the INEOS team adapted to this new challenge in their planning process was actually quite straightforward.

“When the pandemic hit, from a day-to-day working perspective, we were actually very well organized. People were assigned to work remotely, and we already knew how to interact using online tools. So instead of meeting in person on a regular basis, everything simply moved online.”

Source: Siemens

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