Hydrofoil project

Hey everyone!
Together with a friend I am planning on building a remote control hydrofoil sailboat. If this is a success we will build a larger catamaran for people to sail on. I am an aerospace engineering student and the point of the project is to test some electronic systems on the boat. However, none of us have any experience with building model sailboats. Do you have any tips on how to construct the hull? The problem is that we will probably make a lot of changes so an aluminum hull with self-designed parts that can be screwed together but also easily unscrewed would be nice. My idea was to make the parts using a CAD program and then giving technical drawings of these parts to someone to manufacture. The hull would be a problem though as I have no idea how to make that in a program. Do you have any experience with this? The alternative would be to make it out of fiberglass or so and just buy the other parts somewhere.
I would really appreciate any help or tips you can give me.

(is going to be a trimaran btw)

 

Hi Lightntasty,
For hull design you can use FREE!ship from HydroNShip @ http://www.hydronship.net/index.php?lang=en, or maybe DELFTship @ http://www.delftship.net/delftship/ . Both are free hull modelers.
Hope it helps.

 

Would a Hydrofoil be of any use to a small Lake fisherman?

 

alright thank you very much that already helped quite a bit. do you, in general, know which companies can produce such a hull in aluminum if I gave them the right plans and drawings for it?

@thudpucker: you would be home the fastest meaning you could serve the freshest fish! but in practice you probably wouldn't benefit a lot on a small lake.

 

Hi thudpucker,
Sincerely I do not think so, but you can try! It could possible, I do not know if you are a professional or sport fisherman, thus the related load and necessary power. Finally according to Lightntasty, you could not benefit if the distance is short. I consider it is not feasible.

Hi Lightntasty,
Welcome. I do not know about aluminum boatyards / shipyards in your area, you should do some google search. I can do some research in Spain but it'll be probably more expensive.

 

I think I may already have something figured out in my area. But thank you for your help!

 

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For a test model you need to build as large a version as possible to guarantee the most accurate results possible. I can't see how aluminum is a good model building material because, generally, it is very hard to build a model that corresponds to the weight of the fullsize boat without using very light material such as balsa and epoxy/carbon.
This is a very long thread but there may be info of value: http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/mu...-self-righting-trimaran-test-model-36058.html
Good luck! If you provide more info you might get better help-like length and weight of the full size boat, anticipated model length, anticipated full size SA.