As former America’s Cup sailors flooded in to the superyacht racing scene they brought with them not only superior sailing skills but also a more ambitious – aggressive – approach to extracting maximum performance from large yachts hitherto used for cruising. The J-Class (left) is now in an arms race that shades the battles of the 1930s while custom projects like the 67m Hetairos (above) are pushing manageable technology closer to the edge with each regatta season. The 45-strong racing crew on Hetairos is today led by champion owner-whisperer Cameron Appleton; two much bigger square-top ‘mains’ are now being built for racing… Obviously
design work was needed, although some refinement always continues. ‘Superyachts have brought back the fun
in custom sailmaking,’ he says, ‘because now there are an even greater variety of options to work with: there are sloops, cutters, ketches, yawls, schooners… every- thing. And for new projects we are much better at integrating the design of the boat, spars and sails into one coherent package. ‘We can do this because fortunately we
have a smart team of software engineers under Michael Richelsen who can adapt the programming tools to handle these variations in pretty short order.’ And while the tools may be the same as
used in the design of sails for custom race yachts, the parametric constraints around superyacht sail design are much different: for example, failure is not an option, so the engineering must be conservative and not pushed to the edge of load tolerances. While a mast or sail breaking on a race boat is bad luck and may cost you a regatta, breakage on superyachts is a Big Deal and may even cost lives. With today’s integrated simulation
software now connecting up the entire sail and rig package, loads can be evaluated in the constituent parts of this system and even used to help identify the characteristics of the underlying and supporting struc tures needed to accommodate these loads. Burns cites an example: ‘We are now
working on a large project where the mast is deck-stepped, and while the compres- sion loads were fairly easy to calculate the project engineer wanted to have estimates of the side loads at the partners so a suit- able frame could be built. Our design suite of tools enable us to help with this,’ an indication of the sophistication and improvement of these tools. ‘It’s pretty rare to have a new project
now where we don’t have input through- out the process, and introduce some feed- back loops, simply because it is much more efficient,’ even with the long lead-times of the typical superyacht project. Burns reckons that in the timeline of
superyacht sail development North were particularly fortunate in having the tools and materials ready when the class started taking off – just as 3Di was entering
production in 2009-2010. ‘Using carbon to get the previous-generation string sails strong enough was not going to work very well, along with the limitations in mould sizes and the shapes of the time,’ he said. ‘3Di was in development, so with our
software tools, DesMan and Membrain, already in place we could start fairly quickly on adapting this new technology and designing these sails – then it became a matter of figuring out how to add detail and finish them. The devil is in the detail, and on a superyacht the details are pretty big… but this is where good project management really pays dividends.’ This is also when it became clear the sail
design process could provide a valuable feedback loop to the rig and even boat design process. An example of this integra- tion was the Hetairos project (issue 369), one that started life envisioned as a large all-composite yacht constrained only by Panamax mast height limits of 62m, but also with the design brief to be the world’s fastest sailing yacht of her size and type. When launched in 2011 this 66.9m 220-ton ketch designed by Dykstra and w
SEAHORSE 47
OSKAR KIHLBORG
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