Moment of inertia

[ghisio]

Hi,
I am a student working on a thesis about the effect of moment of inertia in yaw during a tack...Can anybody of you give me some information or tell me where to find any?

[MikeJohns]

Well if you make a call on the pivot point and know your mass distribution you can calculate this simply enough, in real life the pivot point moves, another problem will be the damping coefficient.
For texts on this look at control systems textbooks particularly rudder control system design for ships.

[mgpedersen]

Is this what you're looking for? As an added bonus it has all they funny math symbols and stuff

[Petros]

Damping could be significant, consider that a light weight catamaran comes about real sluggishly because of the hulls dragging in the water. A similar, or even much heavier mono-hull can often be whipped around the centerboard pretty quickly.