High speed blue water hydrofoil

I am going to build a 10m hydrofoil to cross oceans with.
Next generation stuff.
No ropes(apart from mooring)
Drone style stabilisation(inertia and gyro) of hydrofoils
Light weight, I have been training for endurance the last few years and weigh 68kg.
Max load of 500kg including crew, water/food/tools etc.
The only thing in the cockpit will be the crew to keep the weight up high low, hopefully there will be less than 200kg above the mast including the weight of the cockpit itself and crew.
Going to go for 2 solid wing sails, less of a handful in big seas, plan to rotate them under the water in storms.
My main aim is to keep everything high, rely on fast reacting electronics to keep it upright and a foolproof capsize recovery plan.
Here is my first concept, the cockpit is the bubble that sits above the 2 wings.
All keels/foils will rotate about the y axis so no rudders are needed and the boat can point into the wind and sail in another direction.
It can not be more than 10m in length as that is my maximum build area.
This sucker should be able to plough through 5m high seas.
Something is going to go in the water next year, I am on my last legs and this will be my last project.
I have a Tornado and A-class Catamaran to use as donor/test boats with excellent sails and rigging.
Constructive comments/participation welcome .

 

Looks like an enormously difficult project, to complete. The accommodation looks a touch cramped.

 

Enormously complicated I can deal with , enormously expensive and time consuming I cant. Accommodation will be fine, it's larger than what you get in a motor vehicle. The most important comfort is going to be warm and dry and not having seas crashing around you, cockpit will have a lot of glass/perspex and be air tight when you need it to be.

I am already at the CFD stage, get stuck into the electronic control next week and I have a large swimming pool I can rig up a test rig to develop the electronic control, save a lot of time there.

 

Yay my very first "hello world" foil simulation that I did in ANSYS. Traced my own foil shape in Rhino then created the mesh in ANSYS and did everything from scratch.

 

Your location of "Mars" does tend to suggest this isn't necessarily a thing that is a serious proposition. What is the budget ?

 

I have race ready A-Class and Tornado Catamarans that I can use for donor parts or testing, I can do Vacuum infusion and prepreg, just going to use carbon fibre beams to connect everything together, I have motors and servos and all the control gear already, if I put the time in, then the money needed to finish is not a problem. I have sail boats that can do 25>kts already, I raced at those speeds in heavy seas, I know what works and what you can forget about. The round the world record is an average of 30kts. The sail rocket technology using wing-sails and foils has already achieved 60kts, I only have to get an extra 5kts from 30kts that are up for grabs........even if I don't get the record I can at least get 25tks which is a LOT of fun in an ocean going boat. It's win win win

 

Well, you seem to have enthusiasm and energy out of whack with your self-description of " I am on my last legs".

 

I have to go for tests next week but I figure I'm at least good for another year no matter the results, I spent so many years already on this project, especially physically like testing how far I could push my body, I'll be damned if I am going to not going to see it through, I can swim 100km in 24 hours as long as I don't get hypothermia, I now always wear a wetsuit when sailing from the discoveries I made in water survival, you don't stand a chance if you just have skin to water. Downloaded all the Navy SEAL tests and marines and SAS and anything I could find in water survival, exceeded by far all their requirements, I cheated I took up free diving which is the best discipline to learn if you want to survive in water, overcoming your panic breathing reflex is the most valuable technique when it comes to water survival, you eventually will tire and suck in water, something accidental....and your standard untrained breathing reflex will kill you. My bother in law died from cancer, I have no intention of shrivelling away with tubes hanging out, got to get to it....hahaha

 

Best of luck!!

 

Thanks

I just spent the last 100 hours pulling my hair out with ANSYS but I finally cracked it, worked out how to construct perfect meshes of any foil. I am now importing the data from one of the many websites that have the stored NACA profiles into Rhino. Must have done the entire database trying to get ANSYS to work, can do them in about 3 minutes now. If enough people are interested I could write a tutorial on how to take any NACA foil and get a pressure map like this without having to do any tracing or constructing anything, I also found a quick way to adjust the mesh with respect to just foils without needing a degree in mathematics. I could not find a single tutorial that covered ---How to make a CFD pressure map of any foil-----plenty on a certain foil but nothing how to repeat and understand what you need to understand, like scaling it and how to adjust the quality.

Next goal before the end of this week is to validate at least 10 foils with real life experimental data, then I can start using it to design my boat.

The first CFD image shows the water pressure around the NACA 6412 at 20kts
The second is the flow of water around the foil at the boundary layer.

 

I would suggest that you design a model of your boat- as large as you can afford and build quickly-then do it. The stuff your learning from your foil research will not help you as much as would a working model. And if you need help building the fullsize version you'll be much more likely to get it with a working, proof of concept model. Just an idea......

 

A foiling craft does not use its hulls when foiling, you just need something that will allow you to get up to foiling speed and that's it, sea-keeping ability is not important, apart from laying low in a storm or when moored. I need to develop a great electronically controlled foil system and then a good sail wing and then after I have those two requirements met I will look at what I have and connect them up with carbon fibre beams. If I build a hull first then I might end up with something unsuitable for the foils and wings that power the boat along. I haven't got a clue what the foils and sail-wings will weigh and until I know that I cant make floats the correct size and length and position to support them. Also the ANSYS stuff will be perfect for developing the electronic control, I can use it to create lookup tables and then I read the sensors and go to the lookup tables and set the outputs accordingly. I have been involved with CAD since day zero, I will be up to full speed with ANSYS within a month no problem, I've used CAD on all my large projects to test engineering ideas without having to first build them.

 

What is your most complex, completed boat project, so far ?

 

After I left college I worked at a company that produced the safety systems for nuclear power stations then I went into aerospace, destruction testing of space rockets and fighter jets, we would bolt the capsule or aircraft to a huge vibration platform and shake them to death, the power of the vibration was so intense that every part of your body would hit its resonate frequency and you would sing just by opening your mouth, also worked in aviation restoring WW2 fighter aircraft like the Spitfire and the Corsair. Hardest and most complex was when the newly appointed CEO of the firm I worked for decided we were going to make money restoring wrecked aircraft and he purchased an aircraft that aborted take off and burnt up at the end of the runway, I had to rewire the entire aircraft, the paperwork alone was a mission impossible and because it was burnt out it was hard to tell what revision of the wiring had been installed. Both the mechanics and the avionics guys told the CEO it was impossible and we just started on it thinking he would come to his senses, he was fired shortly after but we eventually finished it, just by focusing on the next step, I can never forget the terror of that first day looking at it and how it seemed insurmountable, the paperwork was a killer... and now I am going to slum it with a poxy boat.

 

This is my first look at the AC45 wing sail in ANSYS, everything is way off scale,I used the default mesh just to see whether it could process it before spending a lot of time on the mesh. Apparently you do not want your tail wing directly behind the main wing it needs to be offset. I saw this profile used on a number of super fast catamarans so I think I am going to start with it. I want to use ANSYS to calculate an ideal solution by running many simulations, I will dedicate a computer with a fast graphics card in it to crunching the data 24/7, I have a PC that I built myself that is water cooled with a motorbike radiator on the back that can number crunch about 100 times quicker than your fastest resale PC.

I have all the electronics ordered for the foil control should arrive on Friday. I was looking at "hull"construction in CAD today but without knowing the foil or wing specs it's impossible to start. Going to focus all my energy into getting the foil control working, then making a full size foil with quick change of the foil blades a feature while also working out the design of the sail wings and how to manufacture them, I was thinking of make scale models from the largest piece of foam I can buy, that way I can test profiles just from hot wire cutting two pieces of foam and use the foam wings directly for testing, should be able to get foam in 3m lengths, if I can get 4m lengths then I can test full scale quickly.