Everyone’s (hard) at it
There are few areas of raceboat technology harder to keep secret than the latest sail designs and engineering solutions. One of the hottest – and most publicly visible – areas of development right now is perfecting a cable-free headsail that not only goes fast… but that also lasts
There has been a significant amount of hype and hyperbole about the development of headsails without furling torque-cables, and, like most good ideas, this concept has been around for a while. At North Sails their designers began working on this concept with Oracle Team USA and Emirates Team New Zealand during the 34th America’s Cup, when radical boat designs placed extreme loads on the 3Di headsails. The design and engineering challenge was to deliver a solution where headsail loads were redistributed from the torque cable/headstay and shared with the sail. Known within the North offices as Load Sharing Technology this feature, when paired with a 3Di Helix Luff, is North Sails’ answer to what others may call the cable-less headsail concept.
64 SEAHORSE
North’s head of engineering and design JB Braun explains, ‘trying to reduce loads on boats and rigs while maintaining headstay tension has begun a trend and has opened up design ideas to rethinking the significance of luff cables, and in the case of Helix sails, to transition load out of a traditional anti-torsion cable and redistribute it into the sail. 3Di technology is better suited to the sharing application because all 3Di sails are engineered with tapes laid in varying orientation and depth to optimise load distribution throughout the sail. 3Di’s intrinsic load sharing properties, coupled with a Helix Luff effectively move load reliance away from a cable/headstay and into the sail structure thus potentially reducing the overall loading. ‘The critical breakthrough with
Above: North Sails’ new Helix Luff technology transitions headsail loads out of a traditional anti-torsion cable and redistributes them,
optimising the load
distribution throughout the sail and potentially reducing the overall loading
Helix sails is that redistributed loads allow the headsail to project forward the structure on the front of the sail to achieve headstay tension and luff projection, while reducing the load on the boat, mast, and rigging. The engineering emphasis is focused on the innovative, barely visible carbon Helix Luff structure, a 3Di design manipulation which projects the sail forward, punching the luff out in front of the boat. Load Sharing Technology coupled with the Helix Luff is empowering North to reimagine both roller furling downwind (Code Zero and A-3 style sails), reaching sails, and even may translate to some styles of upwind sails. It’s almost like another trim point. The 3Di technology paired with the powerful North Design Suite tools enables mapping and displacing loads to
IAN ROMAN/NORTH SAILS
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