Opposite: two more happy customers. Australians Mat Belcher and Will Ryan have just secured their long-overdue gold medal in the Men’s 470 at Enoshima in 2021 using a new 470 rudder (left/below) from Akihiro Kanai’s ACT Technologies. Wind Challenger (above) is one of the two current wind-assist commercial shipping projects in which ACT is involved; the crescent aero-profile of the telescoping ‘wings’ in this system diverging from the majority of rival wind-assist with their quasi-traditional solid sails or spinning Flettner rotors – the crescent shape being explored for the better driving force it has demonstrated at narrower true wind angles. And the Wind Hunter system (below) – an ambitious and imaginative solution for turning wind into hydrogen for use in fuel cells and other applications


here the results to date have been extremely gratifying. Our innovative rudder concept for the


470 first went public when it was used by Australia’s 2020 Tokyo Olympic gold medallists Matthew Belcher and Will Ryan; significantly, much of their technical preparation for Tokyo was overseen by former skiff champion, America’s Cup skipper and yacht designer Iain Murray, who has a formidable grasp of all things performance related. More recently our 470 rudder and our modified 470 hull were employed by the Japanese team of Okada and Yoshioka who took a silver medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics. As we have touched on in this brief


article, CFD now makes a positive contri- bution in the design of almost every type of marine vessel. CFD will be increasingly used in the development of future new technologies and it already offers solutions for commercial ships to save fuel. In the realm of racing yachts and large


cruising and superyachts, CFD can increasingly simulate complete vessels, rigs, sails and underwater appendages, and I believe that in due course it will almost entirely replace the ‘traditional VPP’. Then again could there come a time


when AI controls everything, making designers themselves obsolete?


SEAHORSE 53 q


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