configurations that these boats are exposed to. ’
In dealing with many of the world’s top players including companies like CDK Technologies, and Carrington Boats, which have produced many of the most extreme offshore machines, along with younger businesses such as Black Pepper Yachts, who built Armel Tripon’s radical looking L’Occitane en Provence, Gurit’s technical sales manager Yannick Le Morvan sees this at first hand. ‘Collaboration is the key to moving these projects forwards,’ he says. ‘The detail with which the modern designs are being built means that the whole exercise is a collaboration rather than the previous relationship where the partners may have simply supplied materials and/or data. A good example of how this works in practice is in the construction of a laminate and the precise way in which the fibres are laid. ‘For a given area we are now incorporating more layers that are thinner and arranged more precisely to achieve the best structural properties. Where in the past we may have used a 300g/m2 fibre at 0° and say 90°, now a large proportion of the laminate is made from 150 gram plies laid in multiple directions. This means that the layup process has to be more accurate which in turn takes more time and, in some cases, requires a slightly different approach. The de-bulking process is more involved too as you have to get the air out from between every ply. ‘The more refined nature of the laminates also has a bearing on the cure cycles which are often more complex and where you need to understand more about the material science to create the best structure. ‘With these and other factors in mind it was great to work with CDK technologies because it is this kind of partnership that is helping to drive these projects forward.’ Not every team in the current Vendée Globe cycle had the luxury of starting their projects from a blank canvas. For teams like Isabelle Joschke’s MACSF and Boris Herrmann’s SeaExplorer (both benefiting from the collaboration between Gurit Structural Engineering and VPLP), upgrading a previous generation design to accept modern foil thinking required a subtly different approach in places. These boats were not originally designed with the current level of foiling in mind, making it harder to include sufficient structure to accommodate the new loads from the foils without increasing the all-up weight. ‘In these cases, in addition to providing sufficient support structure for the foils, you also need to make
Above and right: Hugo Boss is one of 12 teams in this yearʼs Vendée Globe that have called upon Guritʼs
composite engineering expertise to help design and build or modify their boats – thatʼs more than a third of the entire fleet. Guritʼs role isnʼt just limited to preventing things from breaking. It also helps the designers and builders ensure that when things do break – as when Hugo Boss hit a floating object in the Transat Jacques Vabre – they do so without tearing the boat apart
sure that you're not going to break existing structure elsewhere in the boat,’ says Manganelli. ‘You need to work around a layout that hadn't been really optimised for that foil size and position in the first place and you also need to take into account the increasing loads that are being transferred elsewhere. In addition, as the boats go faster, they will slam
harder and so many of the earlier generation boats have ended up reinforcing their hull shells as a result of fitting new foils.’
Whether it’s a brand new launch or a reworked earlier generation design, this Vendée Globe cycle is already proving to be an innovative one before the race has even started.
www.gurit.com
q SEAHORSE 63
LLOYD/HUGOBOSS
ALEX THOMSON RACING
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