Top: a remarkable journey, from a dark corner of a UK boatyard where Bill Green and Ian King allowed Jenkins to fiddle away on his strange projects, to delivering highly sophisticated unmanned sailing vessels to Alaska for very grown-up ocean research. Now manufactured using female carbon tooling (right), the latest Saildrones feature deeper, heavier keels for greater stability, placing less reliance on the small amas. Better solution (left) – as Saildrone ploughs the freezing Bering Sea the skipper sits in a nice warm office
of payload and power. If you ask scientists what they want next, it is always an increasing list of sensors, which meant we had to increase both the displacement and the solar panel area.
Generation-4 is 3ft longer, at 23ft, but nearly twice the displacement. While Gen-3 was optimised for high latitudes (small wing etc), Gen-4 is designed for equatorial conditions, where the wind is light and surface currents are strong. The slightly larger platform gives an average speed increase of 1.5kt and has more than three times the solar panel area, compared to Generation-3. Additional sensors were an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP, which records currents down to 300m in high resolution) and a pCO2
system, which is a complex 38 SEAHORSE
combination of pH, dissolved oxygen and carbon sensors that enable the total alkalinity of the water to be calculated, the ultimate measure of ocean acidification. I do all the boat design myself, but we are careful not to make any radical changes to what is a very seaworthy, tried and tested configuration.
Generation-4 is subtly evolved in all areas to give it slightly better performance and handling characteristics. Fuller bow sections and a narrower transom take it closer towards a double-ender configura- tion, which has a number of benefits, especially for rates of pitch.
The keel is a bit longer, but still within the limits of a standard 40ft shipping con- tainer, but the extra depth and a bit more lead give it twice the righting moment of
its Generation-3 predecessor. The wing is a bit bigger and higher aspect for better efficiency in the light equatorial breezes. Finally, we have added a small thruster with a folding prop for those times when there is no wind. Luckily, no wind usually coincides with clear skies and sunny condi- tions, when we have excess power to divert to the thruster, which provides an extremely efficient motor-sailing configuration due to the exceptionally low aero drag of the rig. Manufacture is by epoxy infusion using carbon female tooling, all machined at Janicki Industries. Our own 50,000ft2 production facility in Alameda, California is right on the waterfront, enabling direct deployment of our growing drone fleet straight out under the Golden Gate and away into the Pacific Ocean…
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