Wing sail manufacturers

Does anyone know companies/persons who actually design and build the wing sails for eg Americas Cup yachts?

As far as I know none of the big sailmakers are engaged in this area.

 

these soft wingsails are being done by doyles sails in sydney i assume they are connected to new zealand.

 

The base design wingrig that challengers could buy from the defenders was designed by North Sails.

Steve Clark posts here. He has designed and built C-Class wing rigs. He can probably point you to the folks he has worked with in the past (Dave Hubbard and Duncan MacLane, perhaps the most experienced wing rig designers to date).

Hall Spars has built an A Class wing rig.

Morrelli and Melvin (designers) have been very active in the design of wing rigs.

 

There are so few wing rigs so far that they are not production items. Each one is custom designed and built by the teams and their supporting builders. The exception is the rig on the AC45, which is built by Core Builders of Warkworth, New Zealand.

Wing rigs have more in common with light aircraft than they do with soft sails, so if you were looking to have one built, you might look for companies that are in the homebuilt aircraft business. I don't know who that would be in Denmark.

 

I suggest you to visit feareastsails.com; they are one of the best sail maker and designer. They used computer CAD for designing and for cutting they used latest equipment.

 

Come and join us on "Homebuilt Airplanes" forum - we loves discussing unusal topics.

I come from an airplane background - ultralight, experimentals, vintage and general aviation and my latest thought project is an ultralight with sail wings - rather closely related to wing sails! The two areas, wings and sails, are very closely related as we all know and perhaps you find something useful by bringing it up in the forum. Wing sails take up below the speed range where aircraft wings start and have some pretty interesting properties. NASA did study a sailwing aircraft in a wind tunnel and it worked surprisingly well (google "Princeton Sailwing").


www.homebuiltairplanes.com

 

Is it true Boeing and Airbus are hired for the windtunnel test of the new wings of the AC 72's ? Or is this classified? If so please provide me with pictures (untricked) via my personall mail schakel488@yahoo.com

 

this one might also be of interest - it is a soft wingsail:
http://www.omerwingsail.com/

 

Hi We are working on a few projects of both framed wing sails and also soft frame assisted and inflatable wing sails and other 3d sail profiles.

Feel free to get in touch should you need or have a project in mind.

Cheers

CAV

 

You won't believe this

I had the concept for that soft wing sail in my head 10 years ago. I could even find sponsorship for development. Why didn't I do that? I was to busy designing and starting up processplants like wasa.
http://www.biocentre.co/about/projects.html

Is important as well. May more Important I thought at that time.
By the Way: I simply like start-ups. And Hazops!

I am trying to pull of a Hazop for the next america's cup. I hope there will no crews smashed.

Case: two AC72 head in opposite course for each other not able to steer away. a crashing at 2 times 50 knots.

Solution: crews jump off, but expensive carbon foiling cat might be gone forever.

Case 2: Foilg cat heads for shore uncontrolably at 50 knots?

Same solution? well if the teams do that they will be using 20 extremely expensive carbon platforms and only 3 are permitted...Meaning they lost the cup. And that is where it is all about.

I do not know: I have a very bad feeling about the upcoming Cup

 

It's not true with regard to OTUSA. AFAIK, no wind tunnel tests were done on the AC72 - it was all computational fluid dynamics. I can't speak for ETNZ, but I doubt Boeing or Airbus were involved.

 

Wether formally or informally there is a technology transfer between Oracle and Boeing. The wing designer for Oracle, Tom Speers, is a former Boeing engineer. There was an article (which I can't find) that discussed taking the flaps design from the sailboats and using it on planes. Apparently the variable geometry of the sail wing was much more efficient than plane multi-flap designs.

 

While he did work at Boeing, he was in a flight controls research group in a different division from Boeing Commercial Aircraft and was not involved with aerodynamic design at Boeing. And, lest one jump to conclusions, Boeing technology was not used in the control systems of 17, either.

I think the most recent cooperative activity between OTUSA and Boeing has been the destruction of the IACC yacht USA 71 to look into ways of recycling carbon fiber structures. In the 33rd AC campaign, Boeing was interested in OTUSA's ability to make composite structures more cheaply than Boeing. AFAIK, the last time Boeing was involved in the America's Cup was when Winfred Feifel was on the One World Challenge design team.

 

That's what I wanted to know

Hi Tom Speers,

I there by any change a development to foresee that the efficiency of the wings become way higher then it is now? I think so. It still in de beginning of development phase so I suspect, the same as car engines, there will be a long learning curve in efficiency. When this happens the carbon rigs will be equally faster and faster until a point that steering is not under control. That is what I see as a designer. What is your opinion? And how are CEO Russel Couts and Larry Ellison to control the wild beasts that they have released?

Do you have an opinion about that?

 

The fundamentals of efficient wing design have been worked out for a long time. There are some unknowns, but fewer than for soft sail design. One big advantage of a rigid wing is you know what the shape will be when sailing.

The key to improvements is the integration with the rest of the boat. Class rules play a huge role. For the AC72, the wing planform was very constrained, which was intended to ensure the boats would be close in performance. I think it was the integration of the wing with the platform aerodynamics that gave 17 more speed potential than Aotearoa.

When you have a boat that is as under-crewed as the AC72, the design of the wing control system has a big impact on the ability to sail the boat to its potential. As we saw in race 8 of the 34th AC, a wing can fly itself out of control of the crew if the control system isn't designed and operated properly. We also saw how tuning of the wingsail can lead to significant improvements in performance. One thing that people don't appreciate is more CFD resources go into figuring out how best to operate a wingsail than go into determining what shape to build.

Wings are expensive items, and it may be that wing development in the future will be restricted so as to avoid having to build a number of experimental wing designs to optimize the boat's performance.