Testing Boat Designs

[Eric Sponberg]

The Swiss won the America's Cup in 2003 in New Zealand, and they just defended the Cup successfully this year in Valencia, Spain. They are now in the process of setting up a new race for 2009 or 2010, and it has created huge controversy because of the way the challenges are being handled. The International America's Cup Class (IACC) is to be discontinued in favor of a new 90' design. Also, the Swiss want to participate in the Challenger trials so that they can get some on-water competition with the new class of boat. Apparently, only one boat per team will be allowed, not two as in the IACC class. The American's have challenged the legitimacy of the new race and class, and the whole shebang has landed back in the New York State Supreme Court, which has legally authority over the Deed of Gift. It's all a real mess.

Eric

[Leo Lazauskas]

Originally Posted by Omeron

Can somebody explain how tank testing process perfects a design?
You have this magnificant model, which must take hundreds of hours and thousand of dollars to make, test it, than decide you need to change this and that, and you go back and build another one,test it, and think it is not yet the perfect form, and go back and build another one, than another one.... than start switching keel, rudders...
To me, this seems like an endless process...both in terms of time and money.
Or is it that once you see how the first model behaves, you derive this data and feed it to the brain of the designer and/or computers and expect necessary modifications to be made based on that testing?

Tank testing is an *attempt* to improve a design. There is no guarantee that it actually does much except to ensure there are no really serious design flaws. Unfortunately there are very few experiments at full-scale to confirm that any perceived improvement was actually due to lessons learned in the tank.

Or, to quote Martin Renilson (who might have been quoting someone else)...

No-one believes CFD, except the person who wrote the code.
Everyone believes experimental results, except the person conducting the experiments.

Leo.

[chandler]

Holy smokes, just had to check the world map to see if the Swiss had access to the ocean, guess they do have a small coast on the med. Unbelievable, also in the same breath, shows you how closely the Americas cup is followed.
By the way Eric could you PM me an aproximate design fee for a lug yawl carbon rig similar to Irens Roxane around 33' loa?