Sailing fast to windward is a fine balance between boat speed and pointing ability – as close to the wind as possible. The Cluster will develop geometric systems which mimic the controls for rig tuning and sail shape. Mast bend flattens the sail – which reduces power but improves pointing ability. Also, for any condition there is an ideal combination of tension on the three edges of a sail – which control depth, draft and twist. Simulations will be developed which aim to give dynamic performance feedback – leading to optimal responses evaluated for different tactical situations.

Exploring the trade-off between speed and pointing requires continual small adjustments that anticipate and reflect every variation in wind speed or direction. Crew responses must be choreographed so that some are synchronised while others must be performed in a sequence of tuning loops. Can the predictions of of the scientists confirm and inform the experience of the sailors? That is the challenge!

real time environmental analysis

Posted on by Miriam Dall'Igna

Hello sailors,

Just surfing (or should I say sailing) designing the dynamic site and after a chat with Hugh we though that perhaps this post would help to give some ideas. I am not a sailor and this piece of work does not relate to wind simulations/emulations. The relationship we saw lives on the title of the conference – the dynamic. It relates also to the relationship between artificial and natural worlds and how the dynamic concept of time can change our perception in design.

With the advent of 3d scanning technologies and lately through advances made in diverse fields such as the gaming industry towards the paradigm of capturing movement we started to change the thinking we have towards time when designing an object. We can interfere on that continuous back and forwards process that designing an object consists of from creation to analysis and optimization to consequent adjustments. We can bring the analysis and optimization to the same point in time of the creation and this is the link that we can see of this piece of work and the designing the dynamic.

Well, no more explanations here is a demo of what we can do when analysis, evaluation and  creation come together. Here it is.

Here is another piece of work that also deals with the theme:

Hope these will help to inspire :)

Miriam

 

 

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Dynamic sail

Posted on by Kristoffer Josefsson

This is a rough, initial simulation of a sail using Kangaroo for Grasshopper/Rhino.

We  illustrate the concept of draft and depth of a sail, through measuring the furthest point from bottom of the sail to the foot.

The ratio of this distance to the length of the foot is called the depth.

The corresponding point on the foot gives us the draft, in this case as the ratio from the front of the sail to the total length of the foot.

There are many ways to improve this model. The sail here is modeled with a too  elastic material, the shape is not that of real sail, the connections to the mast and the foot are too simple to provide all characteristics of a sail in wind.

And of course, most importantly, it is not a complete fluid-dynamic simulation! But it may be enough to start thinking about: what features of a sail will we expect to see from a simulation, and what can we discard? What physical quantities (pressure, forces etc.) do we want to be able to read off dynamic geometry?

 

Sailing robots

Posted on by admin

From Kristoffer:
When I first thought about a mathematical approach to sailing, I looked into if there has been any work done on optimal control of sailing vessels. It turns out that there is an international community of robotic sailors, similar to what exists for robotic soccer, for example.

There seems to be two major robotic sailing competitions:

You can get an overview of their typical activities from a team from ETH Zurich:

I’m not sure how relevant this is for our discussion at the moment, so I put it here mostly for reference. But at least I find it fascinating to look at the video above.

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