Studying unsteady maneuvers

by Craig Leweck, Scuttlebutt Sailing News
The Lido 14 is a popular Southern California one design class in which I am a 5-time National Champion. While I had a pretty fast boat, everything is relative. These boats weren’t fast. I was once beam reaching in 15+ knots and the boat refused to plane. I worried it was going to explode underneath me.

I would joke how the fastest point of sail for the boat was tacking, and now a new study is tackling the dynamics of this sailing maneuver. To better understand the movement of the sails and wind forces during the turn, mathematicians from the University of Michigan and New York University are taking a look at tacking.

“There has been a lot of work on optimizing the shapes of the sails and hulls of sailboats, but much remains to be understood about fluid-structure interactions during unsteady maneuvers,” said Silas Alben, a U-M professor and author of the paper. “The tacking maneuver is one important example where simplified modeling can help us understand the basic physics.” – Full report