America’ Cup technology: Video analysis for sail design




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

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