the optimisations we can deliver.’ Van der Meer knows his ideal scenario… ‘Even before contract, we are in discussion with the owner’s team, the shipyard, designers and naval architects. You could argue that we’re part of the build team, a project engineer. We start by defining operational profiles and system descriptions together with the owner’s team to figure out how they want their system to operate, what it will do from a user’s perspective, which values are presented where. We supply the valve blocks and the PLCs to make sure that there are no delays in the system, no ramp-up lag, all these things we’ve seen before. ‘We continue finalising our
hardware design, then we start writing technical specifications and functional descriptions, information that’s required for the yard or whatever third-party interface we have: flows, pressures, programming, max values, set values, interface loads. ‘The last phase is making sure
that we have good commissioning protocols, that all values are true, accurate, appropriately logged and available. There is a lot to gain in well-written manuals. It’s a pain in the ass for a crew when there’s hardly any documentation and they hope it sort of does what the owner wanted. They get the keys and it’s “good luck,” you know. They need proper written manuals, where every piece of hardware and kit is clearly and neatly described, how it works, the intention of the operation.’ And what does that human-
machine interface look like to the user? ‘We like bars and enlarged figures for the most relevant values. Yellow bars are warnings with a pop- up that says “You’re getting close to your limits”. Then you get red bars, which tell you that you’re beyond the operational limit and you’ll get an alarm. If you go even higher, to the point where the cylinder starts pressure releasing, paying out when you’re not actively steering it out, you’ll get an even louder alarm
Above: Bart van der Meer is one of the specialist sailng system engineers at Rondal. Top right: the 81-metre Sea Eagle – one of the largest sailing yachts in the world
and the system intervenes by itself. We log all these data points. ‘What we did with Nilaya was
to provide all these limits on the hardware. Taking it a step further would be to base these limits on specific sail sets, wind angle and speed. With self-learning the crew could possibly even train the yacht to a point it suggest trim modifications to acquire higher boats speeds. ‘In the future, we would like
Rondal to be the company that not only provides the muscle but also the brain (PLC), motor control (Valve block) and the nervous system (Sensoring). This way a shipyard only needs to provide oil pressure and power. It would take a lot of the complexity and responsibility away from the yard, who have a thousand other things to integrate, and keep the knowledge with the people who know what we want to achieve. ‘Primarily we’re adding safety.
What we see now is that crews don’t sail beyond certain limits because they don’t have the information to judge whether or not they’re harming equipment. When we convince the owner’s team to incorporate load measurements and position indications and a whole bunch of warnings and values and alarms, we add safety. Crew has the information to judge whether or not they are damaging something. There is a learning curve, in the past only one or two critical values we measured. Now we incorporate load pins on the blade sheets, main sheet, boom vang - every cylinder. As long as we can have these discussions with owners’ teams, we can make these decisions together. This tech is standard in grand prix
racers, why not superyachts? ‘I don’t know. Measuring loads is costly but so is breaking masts. But if there’s a yard between us and the owner and they have to pay for the load pins, they say “It’s not in the spec, there’s no budget for it.” You need to explain to the owner that there’s a risk of
breaking the mast if you don’t work within certain values. They need to invest in data.’ How would van der Meer sell this
to a client? ‘The primary goal is to provide a better human-machine interface so you feel comfortable being able to sail these massive machines. On a 60m-plus yacht, you don’t feel the difference between 500kg of sheet load and a 30-40 tonnes of sheet load. You have no clue what you’re doing unless you have that value available and presented somewhere. When you know, you feel comfortable trimming again. “Ah I’m only at 15 tonnes of sheet load so I can trim on quite a bit.” If you don’t have that value, you’re like “can I? I better not in case I break something”. ‘We could work with self-learning,
where the system runs the yacht’s VPP in the background and suggests changes in sail trim. If the crew manages to sail the boat faster than the VPP, it could shift its green spot to optimise the preset trims. These are capabilities we could have by supplying the whole system. ‘You get similar suggestions on
your phone. GoogleMaps tells you “Take this route, it’s 10minutes quicker.” You find that useful. If you find it annoying you can turn it off. We nowmake trimtables, so for every sail set we provide you with a set of load ranges you can use. If we go further, with better computing capabilities and processing hardware, we could work towards predictions and better advice. If the crew finds it annoying, just switch it off. ‘We want to start investigating
what sensory package we would need on a sailing system for a computer to start learning how to sail. You say “deploy main” and, based on wind speeds and angles, acquiring and analysing data, the main hoists automatically. It’s definitely something we’re thinking about, but it all starts with data.’
www.rondal.com
❑ SEAHORSE 71
TIM MCKENNA
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