The BMW Orcle Racing boat
I don’t know how I found this boat but, I can tell you I was blown away when I did. The BMW Oracle Racing team is an American sailboat racing syndicate and has some of the most cutting edge technology to help them go fast.
bmw oracle trimaran
The boat is a 90-ft. LWL, 90-ft. beam sloop rigged one-off racing sail trimaran Designed by VPLP Yacht Design with consultation from Franck Cammas and his Groupama multi-hull sailing team, BOR90 is very light for its size being constructed almost entirely out of carbon fiber and epoxy resin, and exhibits very high performance being able to sail at 2.0 to 2.5 times the true wind speed
I found the most interesting part of the boat was the sail. On Sunday, November 8, 2009 BMW Oracle Racing revealed the replacement to their mast that broke on November 3, 2009. Instead of using cloth-like sails, they are using a hard surface shaped like a wing. The wing can change shape so that the boat can sail at different angles to the wind. This allows it to sail in any direction that a conventional sailboat could go. The wing is very high aspect, meaning that it is very tall and narrow. It is 190 feet tall and is 80% larger in area than the wing on a 747. This allows the airfoil to be very efficient (producing lots of lift with minimal drag). On November 10, BMW reported that they hit 32 mph boat speed while highest reported wind speed during this time was less than 10 knots. [2]
Notes on the wing
- The wing sail consists of two main components: the main element and the flap element. The main element is one single piece that rotates around the mast step. Eight individual flaps rotate around the trailing edge of the main element. Both elements are separated by a small gap and linked together by nine main hinges.
- The wing is primarily constructed from carbon fibre and kevlar with a light, shrinkable aeronautical film material used as an overall skin over the frame. Nearly 40,000 man-hours of construction went into building it.
- According to Joseph Ozanne, an aeronautical specialist with the BMW ORACLE Racing design team, the ability to trim the wing easily is one of its big advantages over a soft sail.
- With a soft sail, it’s so big, it’s difficult to shape as you only have control over three points (head, tack, clew). You need massive tension to trim the soft sail,” he says. “With a wing sail, you can get the shape you want much more easily.”
- The main trim parameters are: master wing rotation (similar to mast rotation on a conventional rig); master camber control (general rotation of the flap element); flap twist control (each flap can have a specific angle of rotation).
- “On paper, it’s a clear advantage over the soft sail,” Ozanne says. “It’s on such a different scale to what has been done before, it’s hard not to have some uncertainty. But we are more and more confident… I think it’s going to be a strong addition for us.”
You can read more about the boat and see a few videos on the teams website – http://bmworacleracing.com/
