Carbon fibre hull weight estimation

[Panos_na]

Hi there!

I am dealing with a project for my university and my group is designing a racing sailing yacht.

We have designed the hull and now we want to estimate the hull weight.

The hull is going to be constructed from carbon fibre. Although it is easy to find the weight og carbon fibre fabric per square meter, however we don't know how many layers we have to use and what is the weight per square meter of the carbon fibre together with the resin.


If anyone can give me some guidelines...

Cheers!

[marshmat]

Regarding what thickness to use: This comes from your structural design calculations, which for a relatively "normal" boat will probably be based on a published scantling rule.

If you've computed a skin thickness, the mass of each segment of hull laminate is just that segment's area, multiplied by the thickness (remember to account for both skins and the core, each multiplied by the density of that component of the laminate), the density of carbon laminate being, IIRC, in the range SG 1.6 to 1.9.

If you've computed the number of layers (there's no shortcut, you have to do structural calculations to figure this out), assuming a fibre-to-resin ratio of 40/60 is often an OK starting point, it can range from 30/70 for hand laid mat to 60/40 or better for vacuum bagged.