Volvo Ocean Race Stopovers

by Mark Bishop, Design Engineer

While a great opportunity to get out of the office, travel and interact with the sailors and team directly, a Volvo Stopover is no vacation! For the current edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, having Farr Yacht Design exclusively involved with the Telefonica Team has meant the nature of the stopover visits have changed markedly. In the previous editions we were on site to support multiple teams and boats. One of the major difficulties faced was that of confidentiality and preventing the cross-sharing of information. For this reason, it was difficult to have a particularly close working relationship with any team. We believe there was a consensus of opinions that this really didn’t help anyone; opportunities lost, for the designers and teams, when trying to extract more performance and a better understanding of these boats.

This time it has been refreshing to be included very much as part of the team and while opinions sometimes differ as to where development should head, to be able to be part of the discussion has, I feel, helped everyone in direct contrast to previous experience.

Being responsible for the structural engineering of the boats, in conjunction with my colleagues Russ Bowler and Chris Cochran of Farr Yacht Design, the main purpose of these visits is to assess the boat’s overall integrity and help with any repairs or modifications the team may require. Thankfully, to date the boats have been performing well and despite some well understood issues with dagger boards and a pretty big wipeout from the boys on Telefonica-Black on the first leg, the boats have really been very “clean”.

The inspection process, while long and involved, is actually pretty straight forward. I basically start at the bow and work my way back looking initially for any obvious signs of distress in such areas as tape joins, frame junctures and high load points such as deck fittings and stay attachments. After that, the hull and deck come in for a close check over to make sure the skins are still bonded to the core. So far all has been perfect and this greatly reduces the stress on the shore crews as well as the entire design team!

Another early morning start; the coffee maker is perhaps the hardest working piece of equipment.

Aside from the composite structure, close attention is paid to the rams and the metallic keel mounting components. A visual inspection is made for excessive or unusual surface corrosion as well as making sure the juncture of metal to composite components are still tight and signs of “working” are not present. Singapore offered the team the first opportunity to take the keel off the boat and fully inspect all bearings and surfaces; this was certainly an event everyone was interested to see. Everything was found to be in good order, so there was no need to utilize additional non-destructive test methods to examine would-be areas of concern.

The site visit schedule itself is very fluid, since in many situations we are not aware of what we will find. In some case we are aware and prepped; for example the damage incurred by Telefonica Black in their “crash” on the first leg. In these cases we can do a lot of preparatory work before hand in determining the basic fundamentals of the repair requirements. Even so, there is no substitute for getting up close and personal with the damaged areas for a closer inspection as more often than not, secondary pieces of damage or other evidence can provide telling insight into what has occurred. This was exactly the case with Telefonica-Black in Cape Town. When the guys broke a rudder and wiped out, there was no suggestion from onboard that they had actually hit anything, which left us somewhat puzzled back at the design office in Annapolis. However when I was able to inspect the boat out of the water there were many visible signs that they had in fact hit more than one object and in more than one place on the boat! Being able to identify this enables both ourselves as designers as well as the guys sailing the boat to get a better understanding of events and what that means with respect to potential development; in this case, rudder strengthening.

Other than the structural review, which tends to occupy the first couple of days, is the important team debrief. It is vital to have the sailors’ feedback on the boat’s performance in conjunction with the sail maker and design team, as the modern Volvo 70 is an extremely complicated piece of kit. The overall performance of the boat is a function of all aspects interacting efficiently and not one single thing. It’s the way the hull deflects that effects the rig, which in turn affects the sails, which effects how they are trimmed, which effects the way the hull deflects……………..let alone the complexities of sail cross-over points and the individual design aspects of the sail’s themselves and the more than interesting hull/water interaction at 30+ knots.

While there is typically only one person from Farr Yacht Design on-site, the entire design team is very much an active participant in the development process. There is a staggering amount of data that is logged from the boats during each leg. This data; true and apparent wind speed, heading, boat speed, sail combination etc., is collated and sorted into a large database that is then used to compare performance against the VPP. This in turn gives an idea of strong and weak areas of performance relative to prediction, so areas where the boat may be under performing can be more closely addressed. The reasons for performance variables can be complicated sometimes resulting from how the boat is sailed, for example; fore & aft trim, heel angle or sail combinations; Other times it may be a compromised as a result of sail damage, hardware damage or a boat related problem. To get a clear understanding of what the raw data is really saying takes close co-operation between the sailors, sail designers and our naval architects to ensure that weaknesses are addressed without (hopefully) giving up too much from an area of strength. This information is also used to gauge performance in future legs against expected weather patterns and may influence routing and tactics as well as the sail combinations taken on board.

To bring of this all together takes an extraordinarily wide range of skills and expertise. When I look around the room during these meetings and think of the guys back in the office during the conference calls, the brain power on display is pretty staggering. Even with this, it remains a formidable challenge; this is where one of the real keys to success becomes apparent and that is TIME. It really takes time for everything to gel and to see what does and what does not work, despite all of the most advanced computational analytic tools available. If you can get a head start on the other teams, this is an advantage that is difficult to overcome simply because the learning and improvement never stops.

The net result, the stopovers are long hard days for all the team members. The sailors have just finished a grueling leg but key members are straight back into it; reviewing performance, sail modifications and further cross-over analysis, decision-making and prepping for the next leg. The shore team is running hard to finish the work list and have the boat and rig primed and ready to go. Amongst all this is the job of feeding everyone and finding accommodation – not easy! Now multiply that across all the teams – no small logistical feat, yet everyone simply, quietly and capably gets on with the task at hand. Being on site certainly allows a greater appreciation of the difficulties faced by the shore crews implementing changes; this is obviously invaluable to decisions made in the design office. Even being in such close proximity to other teams is not really an issue. Everyone from all the different teams are very professional and mindful of each other – not surprising given it is such a small community and friends are spread amongst many competing syndicates.

Being part of this is very satisfying but makes me laugh when friends comment to me about how great it is to “see the world” during the race. Well, I’ve been to Cape Town twice and have still only seen the V & A waterfront where the boats are docked. As I always remark to them, the inside of the boat looks the same no matter where you are in the world except a cold beer is certainly better when it’s warm outside. No holiday, but certainly an experience I wouldn’t miss and a truly great bunch of people to work with as well.

And why it all needs to “work” - tight reaching at 25+ knots

Farr Yacht Design: VOR support stopover schedule:

1. Start – Alicante, Spain – Patrick Shaughnessy, FYD President


2. Cape Town, South Africa – Mark Bishop, FYD Structural Engineer


3. Cochin, India – (FYD trip canceled)


4. Singapore China – Jim Schmicker, FYD Vice President


5. Quingdao, China – Mark Bishop, Luke Shingledecker, FYD Naval Architect


6. Rio De Janeiro, Brazil – Russ Bowler, FYD Vice President and Luke Shingledecker, FYD Naval Architect


7. Boston, USA - Mark Bishop, Russ Bowler


8. Galway, Ireland - Mark Bishop, Patrick Shaughnessy


9. Marstrand, Sweden - Patrick Shaughnessy


10. St. Petersburg, Russia - Patrick Shaughnessy

The Design Process and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

by Bryan Baker, Naval Architect

Working at Farr Yacht Design has been an exciting and challenging experience for me. I began my career at FYD working on hull development via hydrodynamic research for BMW-Oracle Racing. Today, my primary role, unique to FYD, is developing and advancing our in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). CFD is becoming a fairly common term in yacht design but for most sailors its function in the design process is still a bit of a mystery. The best way to explain the utility of CFD is to describe a typical research project and expand on its role.

Think of a typical research project as a filter (Fig. 1). The results from CFD/tank testing are filtered through a Velocity Prediction Program (VPP) to create polar data. The polar data is further filtered through a race model or weather model resulting in a single performance number. This filtering process reduces massive amounts of experimental data to just a single number, like the elapse time of the intended race course, from which an optimum design is chosen. Depending on the size of the research project, upwards of fifty variant designs will be subjected to the filtering process. Each variant is used to explore a specific region of the design space helping to determine the optimal shape.

As shown above, the results of the filter are extremely reliant on quality of the test data. If there exists a substantial amount of error in the test results, then there is a very good probability that a sub-optimal design could be chosen. Thus any testing method requires meticulous execution and exhaustive validation.

In my experience, I have found that research is best executed by substantial automation of key configuration steps to avoid human errors. Pretty much let the computer do the grunt work and never key in the same quantity more than once. At FYD, a sophisticated suite of software has been developed to ensure consistency between research models. This software positions appendages while scaling volumes and moving weights to ensure each design is logically floating on its intended lines. The system also ensures realistic appendage geometry by further constraining foils to maintain realistic structural and/or hydrodynamic requirements.

Test data is best validated by confirmation from two or more completely different sources. A well funded research project utilizes both tank testing and CFD techniques to ensure realistic results. Often, we use tank tests to confirm CFD data, but the validation of both techniques is independent of one another. In the tank, typically a model is tested at some fraction of the full scale design. Thus forces and moments recorded from the model must be scaled to a full scale prediction. Unfortunately, scaling is not often a trivial operation. Usually, many iterations of scaling forces and moments are required to produce realistic results. In general, these results are confirmed by subjective review of polar data from the VPP.

CFD is calibrated much differently than tank testing. The full scale geometry is often tested to avoid the before mentioned model scale effects. Thus validation is only conducted by changing the geometry that defines the problem, the boundary conditions that govern the problem, and/or conditionals that control the problem.

In CFD, the geometry that defines the problem is called the mesh or grid, (Fig. 2). The mesh is constructed of points or nodes at the intersections of lines or elements. These nodes can be thought of as the communicator telling the fluid equations about the yacht and the domain in which the yacht operates. If the mesh has too few nodes, then there is not enough communication between the fluid equations and geometry resulting in error. If the mesh has too many nodes, then the communication will take a long time. The key to meshing is communicating our intended geometry to the fluid equations whilst managing acceptable run times. As technology evolves and computers become faster, larger CFD meshes can be computed, yielding more accurate results with shorter run times. Given current computer technology and costs, we are able to compute CFD results more feasibly than conventional tank testing. A typical tank test could take more than a month considering model construction and number of test cases. A CFD project can happen as quickly as a week given ample resources.

Boundary conditions and conditionals are fundamental to validating CFD results. Most mathematicians would agree that defining appropriate boundary conditions is the most difficult step in solving numerical methods. For this reason, our CFD resources include both academic and commercial codes developed from vastly different boundary treatments. We work directly with universities and other organizations to remain on the forefront of new code development. We rely on only the most experienced fluid dynamics professionals who maintain a clear understanding of numerical error when tuning codes to produce the most convergent solutions.

In a typical CFD solution, we are able to compartmentalize features of the yacht and locally study there effects. For instance, we can directly compute the keel-fin’s lift contribution and compare its effects from one design to another. This is not only useful for determining the validity of a solution, but also understanding the relationships between components of the yacht for a more complete optimization of the entire package. The dillet region at the hull/keel-fin intersection is a good example of optimizing such relationship.

The single largest difference between tank testing and CFD is the ability to visualize the physics of the problem. Techniques exist to trace particles, capture the free surface profiles, and record pressure and shear information in tank testing, however such devices are fickle, setup is often ‘a priori’, and implementation is expensive. CFD offers a more complete picture of these physics by virtue of the equations being solved. As previously mentioned, the nodes of the mesh contain all the information necessary to visualize the fluid domain. The shape’s influence on the flow is easily compared using special plotting techniques. New concepts and ideas can be realized by looking at different operating conditions and comparing different designs.

In all, research of performance yachts hinges on good scientific practice and design experience. We still require more than one tool to accurately predict a yachts performance. We require the most talented experimental and theoretical hydrodynamic and aerodynamic professionals in the industry to ensure the very best test results.

-Bryan Baker, Naval Architect

Making the TP52 an even better IRC option

by Jim Schmicker, Vice President & Senior Naval Architect

Over the years, as handicap systems have gone out of style, older Grand-Prix racing yachts lost value and struggled to find acceptance within the latest rule fashion. It is rare opportunity and welcomed advantage to see this Box-Rule class equally competitive under IRC. TP52s have proven to be very competitive in IRC in their box-rule class configuration but there are many changes easily done that make the TP52 even more competitive and an all-around performer. At venues worldwide under various weather conditions the optimized TP52 is a threat to win any IRC race. FYD has provided optimization services to several owners who have realized the high quality and value of the Farr TP52’s and their enormous potential for IRC racing. The result is a growing fleet of IRC 52’s enjoying fast, competitive and exciting racing with the ability to target events outside of the Med Cup series.

The optimizations can be done in stages and can be tailored for specific venues and conditions. The sail plan is an obvious and cost effective starting point. Conversion to spinnakers flown from a fixed bowsprit is especially appropriate for IRC optimization because it sails at tight downwind angles even when utilizing a spinnaker pole. Eliminating the spinnaker pole offers the additional advantage of a simplified deck layout and easier crew maneuvers. There is little to no performance loss and a significant handicap gain from this change. We recommend an increase in spinnaker area (roughly 10% depending on course type/conditions) for most venues to enhance the marginal surfing performance while still receiving a handicap reduction. Other sail related optimization could include an increase in the jib mid-girth for light wind venues or an IRC optimized mainsail girth. The TP52 rule limits jib & mainsail girths with maximum limits whereas the IRC rule is more open, an increase in sail area could offer a valuable boost in performance against handicap especially in light, sloppy conditions.

A second, very constructive change is increased stability especially for moderate and strong wind venues. Most TP52s carry internal ballast (in the range of 150kg-300kg) and lead encased in fabricated steel fins to stay within the class stability limits for VCG. Since IRC does not limit the ‘vertical center of gravity’ (or stability and keel draft in general) a more efficient arrangement for IRC is a deeper draft, fabricated steel fin with the internal ballast and fin lead moved to the bulb. Stability can be increased on the order of 10% (a practical limit beyond which significant structural upgrades would be required). The IRC handicap is only changed for the modest increase in draft (100mm) yet a substantial gain in upwind performance occurs, offset by a small decrease in downwind performance (added keel volume and wetted surface). For the new keels we have designed with the biggest increases in righting moment we have recommended some strengthening of the keel structure as a prudent step.

FYD TP52 optimized for IRC including QUEST, COUGAR, PANTHERA, RAGAMUFFIN, are winning races from Australia to the Solent. Check the Farr Yacht Sales website to see more Farr-designed TP52s ready to win IRC races for you.

-Jim Schmicker, Vice President

Volvo Open 70 Build Visit

by Chris Cochran, Design Engineer

Working at Farr Yacht Design is truly a unique experience and an amazing opportunity to see projects become reality. As a structural engineer and a sailor, working as part of the design team and communicating daily with the boat builders, project managers, sailing teams, and shore support teams you gain a perspective of the endeavor and efforts required to compete in an event like the Volvo Ocean Race.

Farr Yacht Design utilizes a “Team Approach” in our design process; all design team members are involved with every project, contributing in their area of specialty. Hull shape and design, foils and appendage design, structural engineering, deck geometry and layout, performance analysis and rating optimization specialists all working together on every project; it is impressive to be involved in the design meetings and hear everyone contribute. But the most interesting aspect is being on-site with the project and interacting with the sailing team.

April 2007 I (along with fellow Farr structural engineers Pete Levesque and Mark Bishop) had the opportunity to sail on the original Volvo Open 70, Brasil-1. We assisted Team Alicante with delivering the boat from Gosport, UK to the Atlantic coast town of Sanxenxo, Spain, near the start of the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race. During this roughly 800nm trek we had opportunities to see first hand the remarkable speeds, performance and loads associated with the Volvo Open 70. This was particularly timely since, upon our return to the office, we were to redesign components of Brasil-1 to be utilized as a training platform for Team Alicante and continue our R&D work on the 2nd generation Volvo Open 70 design.

As a follow up to our efforts, in February 2008, I traveled to Valencia, Spain to visit with Team Alicante, our exclusive clients for the 2008-2009 Volvo Ocean Race. The main purpose for my trip was to spend some time with the builders, and work with the team to sort out the final design & construction details of our 2nd generation Volvo Open70s, now well under way.

While in Spain I also had the opportunity to visit the team’s training base in Alicante, about 190 km South-Southwest of Valencia. The sailing team had just returned from a week long offshore session, training on the old Brasil 1; they were having a series of debriefs with the various sailmakers & riggers that consist of the shore crew. The base is well set up now, and it always amazes me to see what can be accomplished with a half dozen shipping containers and some large canopies.

The builder for Team Alicante boat #1 is King Marine, located just outside of Valencia. Boat #2 for this team is being built by Southern Ocean Marine in New Zealand. This international team of boat-builders is doing a great job, creating a state-of-the-art speed machine, carefully laminating every ply of carbon. The Volvo Open 70’s have a high-level of detailed design work associated with the canting keel mechanisms, twin lifting dagger-boards, twin rudders, sail-handling systems, etc. We have spent many hours working with the crew and other experts, considering how the boats operate to arrive at good, light-weight and reliable solutions for all the intricate details. However, seeing these boats in person gives you a vastly different perspective as compared to seeing the drawings on a 20” computer screen. When standing inside the hull I couldn’t help realizing how massive and powerful this generation of Volvo Open 70’s is going to be and my thoughts went back to power reaching on Brasil-1 and just how fortunate I was to have experienced this first hand. The builders are now in the final stages of assembling these systems and we look forward to the launch and first sail to see the product of our labors in action.

-Chris Cochran, Design Engineer

Internship at FYD

by Emerson Smith, Naval Architect & Former Intern

I was thinking back the other day, trying to remember my first exposure to Farr Yacht Design. It seems that the memory I keep coming back to is the Annapolis stopover of the 2001/2002 Volvo Ocean Race. I remember going from boat to boat with my father and learning about each design. I started to notice a similarity among quite a few. What was this Farr Yacht Design?

To sum up my internship in just a few words, it was great! Sure, school teaches you the basics and how to learn. But the real learning does not start until you get your hands dirty. Everyone at FYD is extremely nice and patient. What impressed me the most is the collective knowledge in the office. It seemed as if every question raised was met with a confident and well thought out answer.

My time at FYD flew by. Whether it was working on weight calcs or participating in conceptual design, it was a pleasure working in the office. I cannot express how much I learned in my short time there. In the future I know I will look at designs differently, as I now realize just how much time, thought and energy go into each and every one.

-Emerson Smith, Naval Architect & Former Intern

Open 60 Trim Tabs

by Luke Shingledecker, Naval Architect

The trim tabs on the Farr Yacht Design Open 60’s PAPREC-VIRBAC 2 and GITANA 80 were inspired by the trim tabs that are quite common on powerboats. On powerboats, the tabs are generally hung off the back of the transom, while on our Open 60’s, they are underneath the aft end of the boat and do not extend past the transom. Motor boats only operate upright and are not as concerned with drag as a sail boat so they can get by with relatively narrow tabs, but since sailboats operate at a wide range of heel angles, the trim tabs on our Open 60’s extend almost the entire width of the boat.

The tabs allow the sailor to vary the fore and aft trim of the boat (bow up/down, stern up/down). Since these boats are very light for their size, they respond to the movement of weight forward and aft, exactly like a dinghy. In fact, the boats sometimes carry as much as a few tons of water ballast, and one of the primary reasons for this is to adjust the trim. By lowering the tabs, the flow of water over the tabs is deflected downwards, pushing up the stern, and marginally lowering the bow. The tabs can also be raised to decrease the lifting pressure on the stern, allowing the stern to sink and lift the bow. By adjusting the tabs for the conditions, drag can be reduced and handling can be improved. In moderate conditions, the tabs are adjusted to optimize trim, while in heavier conditions, the tabs can be raised to pick up the bow and improve handling. When combined with the effect of moveable weight (sails, gear, etc) and water ballast, the tabs significantly increase the amount that trim can be varied across the wide variety of conditions these boats see when sailing around the world.

-Luke Shingledecker, Naval Architect