Shine a light
French sailmaker Alain Janet is the founder of Solar Cloth System which has been busy developing a practical system for generating electrical power from thin photovoltaic films laminated onto modern sail fabrics…
In the past sailors have taken the eco - logical high ground over other boaters, yet modern sailing requires far more electrical power than it used to. With new onboard technologies and their growing demands for power, it’s clear that sailors now experience regular energy shortages while cruising and/or racing, even over relatively short distances. And of course the problem grows exponentially when you are racing across oceans and around the world. Sea and sun go hand in hand, so solar power has long seemed to offer an answer
50 SEAHORSE
to this problem. However, rigid solar panels are heavy, bulky and require a lot of ingenuity to install discretely; but what about producing electricity with our sails? Sails offer the largest available surfaces on a sailboat which makes them the most logical place to collect solar power. But if this has not been done before, then there must have been good reason.
Indeed, it is only very recently that usable thin photovoltaic films have sur- faced from the R&D laboratories as a viable commercial product. Even at the start of 2016 the number of suppliers of thin solar film can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Also, none of the lat- est cutting-edge products were originally intended to be used on a sail or by a sail- maker. In fact, when I first contacted the heads of these companies my ideas were generally treated with a large pinch of salt. But on second thoughts, being able to test their new solar films in the harsh real- ity of the marine environment started to look like a useful opportunity: UV, salt, high-pressure seawater, flogging, folding, being stepped on, and so on, suddenly this became a worthwhile complement to ongoing bench testing.
Bringing electricity inside a laminate or onto a woven sail is not the easiest thing to do. Efficiency, durability and safety are
serious issues. Helpfully, however, over the past decade our own French loft (UK Sailmakers) has been developing the ‘titanium’ sailmaking process, using rela- tively less resin, dry continuous yarns and moving away from infrared ‘cooking’ pads to a large 13m oven for better heat and humidity control; the titanium solution appeared to offer a leg-up in our quest for efficient solar power generation. For over a decade we have been lami- nating all sorts of films and yarns, even optical fibres, but the circuitry and flow of electricity inside a sail was very new to us. But consulting with top photovoltaic labs such as IMEC in Belgium, Holst in the Netherlands and recently with CEA in France, I realised that it may not all be as difficult as I had imagined.
In fact, in November 2014, the Open 50 Défi Martinique, skippered by Daniel Ecalard, demonstrated the durability of some of our early experimental technology in the Route du Rhum when the circuitry and connections of the solar films we installed near the head of the mainsail survived a full gale in the Bay of Biscay. The system then went on to survive the 25-day Atlantic crossing, during which Ecalard logged 4,677 miles. The solar films withstood water, salt, rough pound- ings, flogging, thunder and lightning –
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