Waiting for Valencia 2007

32nd America’s Cup new fleet: BMW Oracle Racing

webmaster — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:28:38 +0000

I don’t know the reason but despite the opinion that they are not the favorites among big challengers, I really fear Larry Ellison’s Team. It will be that he has a great personality and never gives up a fight but I feel that they can do the “exploit” when you do not expect it. I feel how his personality it is transferring in his boats. It’ a kind of magic.
There are also a couple of numbers to worry about. The near 200 million $ budget and the newer USA-98.
“Our time in New Zealand exceeded our expectations on all fronts,” Chris Dickson, CEO and Skipper of BMW ORACLE Racing said. “We sailed in a full range of conditions which gave us the chance to fully sea trial USA 98 with new rigs, sails and appendage packages. While it is still early days with USA 98, we are all pleased with the performance to date. Even more importantly, our in-house racing programme has the crew closer to being ready for the Louis Vuitton Cup now less than two months way,” Dickson said.
We cannot see the new boat in action and do not much more than the bowsprit disappeared. Other teams tested this solution: Alinghi, China Team and Shosoloza but it seems not to perform as expected. Also Alinghi is thinking to take it away.

What’s sure is that BOR design team is the one that is exploring different and innovative solution, taking risks.

I remember USA-87 not too fast but able to tack rapidly making impressively accelerations after the transition. This fuzzy design approach increases my fear.
Read this Q & A with Ian Burns the Chief Designer of BOR, on NZ Herald
They worked on USA 87 to better perform speed. Once they solved this problem the Ellison’ Armada could be the unreachable outsider. Here some quotes:

“The ongoing refinement of 87 has always been a major part of our plan to ensure that the 2007 version of 87 is as fast or faster than our opposition.”

The BOR Design Team is trying to reach the next level:

It has been suggested that 98 was constructed differently from 87. A construction technique, created by Paul Bieker, that has never been tried before in a boat this large. Is this true and can you elaborate?

“I have never seen anything quite like the building process that was used on 98. It led to big gains in strength, stiffness and weight. I can’t elaborate on the actual process, but when you put designer Paul Bieker together with builders Mark Turner, Tim Smyth and Mark Somerville and give them access to the aerospace resources in Seattle, you can count on reaching a new level.”

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A video about yacht building

webmaster — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:34:07 +0000

Tonight post interested me so i decided for a walk on youtube. I found this mini documentary about yacht building at Cookson (Do oyu remenber Calipso?)

boats design eng boats design, eng

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America’ Cup technology: Video analysis for sail design

webmaster — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:05:43 +0000

America’s cup is history, dream, competition, war, intelligence, business, art…evereything.
America’s cup is also technology and scientific research and developement. I’m going to study deeper AC class yacht technologies to report something interesting in this blog.
Let’ start with and overview about technologies and research issues.

AC yachts stress professor’s minds at least in four important fields;

Materials development & testing
Fluid Dynamics Analysis
Video analysis for sail design
Strategic Route Planning

Video analysis for sail design is the one I’m more curious about. Lets start arguing about this issues and in the future we will take a tour around the other topics.

Researchers have techniques and tools to extract data from the video sequences. They can study sail and boats respond to the actual and real conditions.

the objective of this analysis is to augment the significativity of the computer or wind tunnel analysis. In this analysis some semplification about sailing environment are made.
The sail is analyzed independently of hull and water. A rigid sail is used in an upright position. To completely model a real sail it would be necessary to use a flexible 3-dimensional sail in a heeled position, and to consider the effects of the hull and sea state. However, modeling something like this would be far too computationally expensive.

Here you can find some videos from WB-Sails. (quicktime video, sorry for linux users)

To learn more about sailing design process read this interesting article in Doyle sailmaker site

High technical issues and an interesting introduction to some designing problems you can find here

boats design eng boats design, eng

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il Cat solare

webmaster — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:42:14 +0000

non sarà a vela ma è ecologico. Diamolo agli spettatori dirante al coppa america.

transatlantic21: Home

boats design news boats design, news

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Monoscafi - Catamarani - Trimarani? no Deriva Moth

webmaster — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:37:25 +0000

Aggiungo una nuova opzione alla annosa disputa di chce vela sei. Monoscafi - Catamarani - Trimarani, Skiff? no Deriva Moth

A parte le differenze di impiego c’è un filo rosso che lega nel mondo delle derive tutte queste tipologie. LA ricerca della Velocità. Al termine di questo filo c’è forse il Moth. Guardate questo e ditemi se stiamo ancora parlando di vela o siamo al confine con il volo.

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