VSR1: Design
2003 - Design of a contender for the outright world speed sailing record
This project was undertaken by four students as a final year project for completion of their 4 year BSc in Ship Science at Southampton University. The objective was to review design options and develop design tools as a first phase towards designing a speed record contender to be completed by subsequent student teams at the University (The boat has started construction in 2005).
Collaboration with the Vestas SailRocket team proved very fruitful for both parties. The student’s choices and design were informed by the extensive practical experience of the Vestas SailRocket team in high performance sailing and speed machine design. At the same time we gained very valuable data and validation for our design. In particular:
- Wind tunnel force measurements on the 1:5 scale model with and without rig
- Validation of our VPP. The students generated their own more general program (applicable to other configurations) which, given the same data , gave very similar speed predictions
2004 - Design Study of Hydrofoils for a Speed Sailing Contender
This project was undertaken by Guillaume Thiebault as part of his 1 year MSc qualification at the University of Southampton. The objective was to review the performance of hydrofoils applicable to speed sailing record contenders and evaluate the feasibility and performance of a supercavitating hydrofoil design for SailRocket. A great deal of relevant data was brought together and performance characteristics generated for both sub and supercavitating sections using 2D CFD codes. In addition a supercavitating section was proposed for Vestas SailRocket taking account of both hydrodynamic and structural issues. Once again this was a very successful collaboration resulting a very sound basis for future development of it hydrofoil which we know will eventually become the critical component.
2004 - Aerodynamic design of a wing sail for world speed sailing record contender
This was an MSc thesis project by Antoine Derely again at the University of Southampton Ship Science Department. The objective was to produce an optimized geometry for a wing sail to suit the existing Vestas SailRocket plan form. This represented a well defined task which was tackled using 3D CFD code and a variety of plan form and section geometries. The performance characteristic for the best configuration was generated so that we have been able to quantify the speed advantage of going to a wing to be of the order of 7 knots in 21 knots wind! The very real and valuable input to SailRocket's development was clearly a motivating factor and resulted in an excellent co-operation and final report.