Modeling IACC Sail Forces by Combining Measurements with CFD

Abstract

A sailing dynamometer with a 42% scale model of an International America's Cup Class rig is used to measure sail forces and moments in actual sailing conditions. The sailing dynamometer is a 35-foot boat containing an internal frame connected to the hull by six load cells configured to measure all the forces and moments between the frame and the hull. All sailing rig components are attached to the frame, so that the sail forces are measured. Sail shapes in use are determined by computer-interfaced video. Computational fluid dynamics performed on the measured shapes provides the induced drag. This allows the measured drag to be decomposed into induced and form-and-parasitic components, which is necessary for generating a mathematical sail force model for a velocity prediction program (VPP). It is shown that VPP results using these new sail force coefficients are in better agreement with actual performance than are VPP results based on traditional sail force coefficients.