Our friends at Professional Boatbuilder have a good article on design…
Three years ago, the design and engineering team for the 100′ (30.5m) Wild Oats XI faced a fairly common problem: how to update an old boat. Except the boat wasn’t at all common, and it was old in maxi-racer years only. Launched in 2005, the eight-time winner of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race tended to sail down by the bow at high speeds, and its design lacked stability compared to newer boats with wider hulls.
“They found that the boat was nose-diving. The boat didn’t have the righting movement,” said Valerio Corniani, global marine manager for DIAB. “It was getting old, if you want, and needed an upgrade.”
Their solution was to add side-lifting foils, a project that Corniani described at the 5th PechaKucha for boat designers, held in Amsterdam this past November. PechaKucha is a presentation model that directs speakers to follow a format of 20 slides at 20 seconds each to tell their stories. In his 6 minutes on stage, Corniani showed AutoCAD drawings of how the engineers found ways—using unidirectional laminate, strip laminate, shear plies, and solid laminate—to dissipate the extreme loads Wild Oat XI’s new foils would be subjected to. Read on.
