Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Maltese Falcon Superyacht Sailing Boat - Video


Original article here
Damon Roberts of Insensys, Ltd. was responsible for designing and manufacturing the DynaRig sail system of The Maltese Falcon in the Tuzla shipyard, Turkey. The design, testing and manufacturing of the system was completed over a three year period. All aspects of the system were incorporated and tested to ensure that the design and finite element analysis matched the actual loads whilst sailing.
The DynaRig owes its origin to work done in the 1960s by Wilhelm Prölss; at the time he believed the system could provide additional propulsion for ships. The DynaRig is effectively a square rig, the mast is freestanding and the yards are connected rigidly to the mast. In this case each mast supports six yards. The yards, unlike a conventional square rigger, have built-in camber of 12%. The sails are set between the yards in such a way that when deployed there are no gaps to the sail plan, enabling each mast's sail plan to work as a single sail. The sails, when not deployed, furl into the mast. The sail is trimmed to the wind direction by rotating the mast. As there is no rigging, the yards have no restriction on rotation and this, taken together with the curved (shaped) yards, low windage and effective single-piece sail, combine to give the rig improved aerodynamic efficiency compared to a traditional square rigger.
The masts are approximately 58 m (190 ft) in height above the bottom bearing. The DynaRig concept calls for an elongated section (to reduce the drag) and this needs to be symmetrical. As the rig can be tacked to allow flow in both directions, the mast rotates about deck and keel bearings.
Insensys also incorporated their fiber optical strain monitoring system that monitors the loads on the rigs to ensure that the carbon fiber structures are never overloaded whilst the yacht is sailing. The fiber Bragg grating system was embedded within the rigs during fabrication of the carbon structure. The system monitors the strains in real time and transmits the loads to the bridge such that they are understood whilst sailing.

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