History

Owing to a unique location, British industry has long been closely tied to unpredictable weather and the sea. This environment produces many problems for designers, as local weather patterns are difficult to predict. Traditionally this has led to products intended to be exposed to the elements being designed around the ‘once in a hundred years’ storm. In sailing it is made very difficult to compile an accurate set of design parameters for the rigging systems due to various ‘unknowns’. These can vary from fairly well understood mechanisms such as the effects of corrosion and fatigue to the more problematic to account for, such as how daring the skipper is.

Thus far there has been very little proper scientific work done on the problem of designing and analysing rigging for yachts. Any work that has been done has tended to concentrate on high performance racing vessels. Chris Mitchell at AES has developed quite complex models for analysing the rig loads due to quasi-static phenomena such as wind and drag. However, due to the complexity of the models involved and the cost associated with running such simulations this sort of analysis tends only to be performed on very high performance (expensive) yachts. Furthermore, by his own admission, Chris has not had the time to estimate the effects of dynamic loads and instead applies factors of safety which work well enough for most practical applications but due to the lack of understanding the factors of safety tend to be rather large. Further improvements in performance could be achived by reducing these factors of safety but doing this requires more complex models to estimate the effects of shock loading and fatigue. Such models would not return a significant enough return on investment for a private company like AES which is where The University of Hull comes in.