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NEWS ET ARTICLES |
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 | |  | |  Monocoque à voile { 26/07/2007 } | |  | |  |
|  Eighteen years ago, our first Open 60, Generali Concorde, was at the start of the first Vendée Globe, with Alain Gautier at the helm. The boat was a radical new design, 5.85 m wide, made out of aluminum, a quasi-empty flat deck, carbon mast, bulb keel and lateral water ballasts. The boat weighed a total of 13 tons.
Having designed Alex Thomson´s new HUGO BOSS and Yann Elies´ Generali, BritAir will be our 17th IMOCA 60´ designed for the Vendee Globe. Those 17 Open 60 have totalled 25 Vendee Globe entries over the years, with 20 of them finishing the race, and a finot-conq designed boat has won 4 out of the 5 editions of the Vendee Globe.
Nowadays, everything is built out of carbon composites and honeycomb, except the lead bulb and a few high strength stainless steel or titanium parts. The boats are still wide (width undisclosed), their keels cant to more than 40° and their ballast tanks are even bigger. Their weight is kept below 9 tons.
Towing tank and CFD research
A significant part of the budget has been spent on tank tests, CFD calculations and weather statistics, which are common to all three boats. These studies allowed us to visualize and quantify dynamic behaviours, and therefore to move one large step further in the design of these boats. The results were interesting enough for us to follow-up on them with a 3 year research campaign at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes towing tank.
All in one place
Two of the boats (GENERALI, BRITAIR) have been built at the Multiplast shipyard, just next door from our premises. This allowed us to work in close link with the teams, and to follow every stage of the build in more depth than ever before. HUGO BOSS, on the other hand, has been built by Jason Carrington at Neville Hutton´s Boatyard in Lymington (UK) , and her structural design was completed in cooperation with SP technologies.
Impressive figures
The progress made in every area of the design allowed us to define a general arrangement of the boat (hull shapes, balance, weight, centre of gravity), which is vastly improved in terms of power, and even more in terms of power/weight ratio, which has grown by more than 30%!
Hard chine in the hull
Why a chine ?
It is not a goal in itself, but rather a means to increase the boat´s power without having to increase the bulb weight. The IMOCA rules specify a capsizing angle of 127.5°, which effectively links the boat´s width (and therefore power) to it´s bulb weight. The goal is therefore to remove from a wide hull shape a part that isn´t often useful, in order to remain light.
Optimized appendages
Slightly thicker and larger than it´s steel counterpart, the carbon keel fitted on all three of our boats is also 400kg lighter! In our simulations, this weight difference largely offsets the drag difference, thanks to the innovative disposition of the appendages. Its very high strength carbon fibre core and high module torsion box are optimized both in strength and vibratory behaviour. The theoretical values obtained through hundreds of hours of calculations have been confirmed by measurements done at the launch of BRITAIR.
The twin rudders can be lifted to protect them from shocks and to remove drag by lifting the windward rudder.
Different rigs
While GENERALI and HUGO BOSS decided upon classical 3-spreaders fixed masts, for lightness and simplicity reasons, the BRITAIR team chose a wing mast with deck spreaders. This kind of rig, invented by finot-conq for Yves Parlier and first installed on his open 60 Aquitaine Innovations in 1996, results in aerodynamic gains that are more and more justified as the speed of these boats increases.
The whole finot-conq team is happy and proud to wish fair winds to these three talented skippers. |
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