Vo70

"The nearest ship, ironically enough, is carrying Ericsson, in transit to Australia after suffering a keel failure two days into the leg and being shipped from Port Elizabeth, South Africa. As no lives are threatened and the ship, which was 300 miles away at the time of the diamasting, doesn’t have a crane big enough to hoist the Volvo Open 70 onboard, this option was dismissed."

from volvo70 race website

 

Maybe next time they should hire hydraulic engineers to design the boats, that would be fun>

Seriously: The Volvo rules state that an overload system (pressure relieve valve?) should be build in the hydraulics system. If the rams fail before the overload system kicks in, I think it's an hydraulic engineering fault. No matter what load Farr specified.

 

There is no excuse for stupidity - and Farr and *** wil not learn anything, because they think they have the ultimate knowledge.

Now they are back at point zero.

Maybe they will learn now.

 

From what I've read and seen of the hydraulic bits that have failed I don't know that the loads were high enough to trigger an overload system.

On Leg One Movistar had a failure of the support structure, no mention that any over load system should have prevented damage to the boat.

Ericsson's keel problems were fittings, not the rams proper (as near as I can tell from the releases).

Pirate's boat is coming apart and leaking when the keel is canted too far.

Movistar's Leg Two problems include several bolts failing on a ram seal. IIRC these were stainless steel. simple over pressure should have triggered the overload device before the bolts failed. SS is elastic, a high static load should have stretched the bolts beyond their elastic limits and caused a leak, If the heads snapped off it sounds like a fatigue problem.

From the descriptions of the failures they all sound like fatigue failures, caused either by repeated shock loads or by forces off the design axis due to flex of the supporting structure.

Somewhere along the line some one didn't do all their homework. Either the forces are not understood or underestimated, or the materials used are not understood and are a poor choice for the application.

 

Not to mention the Brasil 1 rig failure, in "normal" sailing conditions:

“The mast broke in three pieces after what seems to be a fitting failure at the lower end of the port V1 (vertical shroud). The turnbuckle eye broke horizontally across with half of the fitting remaining on the boat and half on the shroud. No other signs of failure have been found so far."

 

For anybody interested a construction details of Erricsson.

 

About that broken turnbuckle...looks like several boats use the same piece. Read what Cayard says about it:


" The information we have on the incident, said that the shroud turnbuckle broke in half. This is a worry as we have the same supplier for our turnbuckles and I believe most of the fleet does too. "

 

Looking at the pictures of Ericsson, the chainplates don't seem to allow any athwartship freedom of the shrouds. That's fine, as long as the angle between the mast and hull never changes. ie. there is zero flex athwartship in either the hull or mast. I also don't see turnbuckles at the deck, I assume the rigs are tensioned with a mast jack? I also assume that the boat and rig are so square that the lowers don't need to be adjusted to get equal tension on both sides of the mast? That's some pretty low tolerance construction! Building two lowers that stretch exactly the same amount and end up exactly the same length when the rig is in the boat is quite a trick.

Not allowing freedom of movement in two planes can overstress pins, forks, and turnbuckles. If these rigs don't flex laterally at all under shock loads falling off a wave at 25-30 knots I'd be surprised. If they flex just a bit, it might be prudent to add a toggle here and there, just in case the structures are not as stiff as they should be.

I wish I was confident enough to build a rig that didn't need toggles and stayed in the boat. I've never seen one that stiff.

 

With thanks to Mike S. again:

Guess the shorecrew just has to do some minor work on 'Black Betty'
and here is it from: http://www.volvooceanrace.org/news/article...last/index.aspx

 

So if I'm not mistaken, current status of the fleet is:
Amro One - In Melbourne
Amro Two - In Melbourne
movistar - limping towards Melbourne with broken keel hydraulics
Pirates - also limping with broken hydraulics
ING - In last place among those still moving on their own power
Brasil - DNF, mast failure
Ericsson - DNF, keel failure

So more than half of the fleet is either DNF or limping home due to broken equipment. As the old saying goes, if you want to finish first, you first have to finish..... then again, all these breakages do make for some media sensationalizing that can only be good for the sponsors.

 

Titanium Out, Stainless Steel In

TITANIUM OUT, STAINLESS STEEL IN
The "movistar" shore crew is finalising the changes that the Spanish boat is to undergo before returning to the water. As it announced in the daily reports during the Cape Town to Melbourne leg, the most important thing is to change the hydraulics that move the Spanish VO 70’s canting keel, which have given the crew a headache since the twelfth day of competition in the waters of the Southern Ocean.

"It is a drastic decision, but we are in no doubt that it is the right one, remarks Bouwe Bekking, skipper of the "movistar". We are going to discard the titanium hydraulics and go back to the stainless steel ones that we used in training before setting off from Vigo. They gave us no problems at all in over 20,000 miles of sailing. That way we can go all out without having to worry about their reliability".

But, if they worked so well then, why were they changed? "What led us to change the hydraulics was a simple search for more speed",explains Pedro Campos, team manager, "another turn of the screw for the boat's performance, but we now know that we were not forced to make the decision as everyone was pushing the limits".

"The hydraulics have failed us because they are made from titanium; it is a very valid material", remarks Greg Waters, expert in hydraulic systems for canting keels. "The problem arose because they were too light, even for titanium. In my opinion, they should have been about 50% heavier, and even then, they would have saved a lot of weight in comparison with the ones we are going to mount now. Titanium has peculiarities that have to be taken into account when working with it, and it is better to make them a bit heavy rather than the ideal weight".

The steel hydraulics will be mounted over the weekend. "The only thing we have to change is the system pressure, because as the new hydraulic arms are bigger, they work at a lower pressure than the old ones. Everything else remains unchanged".

 

Brian, good to pick up the point: 1st - They took the wrong Ti alloy; 2nd They had no idea about surface treatment and 3rd the way the Ti was machined was done to the instructions of farr and *** - totally wrong.

But it is corect to assume that the use of Ti was not necessary here.

 

Pirates is sticking with titanium saving 100 Kg. in the bulb.

 

Can you provide information that backs up this statement?

 

Does anybody knows more about this?:

Ericsson, fourth placed in Saturday’s Melbourne In Port Race today protested its recall at the start, demanding redress for the points it lost in responding to the call.
....
In Saturday’s race, ABN AMRO TWO and Ericsson were each recalled to the start line after having been adjudged to be across the line when the gun fired on the iron barque James Craig at 1400 local time. AMRO TWO appears to have been clearly across the line, but Ericsson maintains it was not premature. It also appeared to respond much later to a recall than ABN AMRO TWO, losing at least two minutes on the rest of the fleet.

That it only lost the race to ABN AMRO ONE by one minute 59 seconds, after clawing its way back through the fleet over the four laps of the windward/leeward course, will be relevant in its case to the jury. Ericsson could well argue it was the fastest boat in the fleet on Saturday.
...
Ericsson today signalled that it wants to see the evidence of the premature start and the timing of the recall.

In a press statement the team said, “The Ericsson Racing Team has strong reasons to believe that there was confusion on the race committee boat, which resulted in Ericsson being erroneously recalled

“The return to the start clearly affected Ericsson’s finishing position in this race; hence the team’s decision to submit a claim for redress to the international jury.”

Rules consultant for the Ericsson Racing Team, John Doerr said, “Unlike in many other sports, sailing has a process in place for claiming redress in case the race was not properly conducted. The International Sailing Federation’s racing rules of sailing (RRS) provide the means to rectify any such errors.”

Ericsson’s request for redress quotes rule 62.1a, “A request for redress . . . shall be based on a claim or possibility that a boat’s score in a race or series has, through no fault of her own, been made significantly worse by an improper action or omission of the race committee . . .”

http://www.volvooceanrace.org/news/article/2006/february/esricssonwantinportredress/index.aspx

Take a look at the start photo:
http://www.volvooceanrace.org/multimedia/

By the way...nice video from the regatta:

http://www.volvooceanrace.org/mediaplayer/index.aspx?guid=91e819df-5583-4dc5-8271-9ed15714920d