All the secrets of Ben Ainslie’s flying superboat

One thousand sensors distributed over the three boats measuring every parameter. Sixteen gigabytes per day of information collected. One hundred terabytes per year of data analyzed. With the advent of multihulls, and especially foils, the America’s Cup has been at the center of a radical transformation in which the contribution of technology is playing a key role. What we saw at the 34th America’s Cup is nothing compared to what we will see in a few months in Bermuda. The progress made is monstrous, and the new ACC class confirms this. One only has to see Team Land Rover BAR’s approach to touch on this shift in gear. The British team led by Sir Ben Ainslie has drawn on Land Rover’s extensive automotive experience to fine-tune the design of the multihull it will field at the start. “To win the America’s Cup, it is no longer enough to be a good sailor if you cannot rely on a fast boat,” comments Mauricio Munoz. An engineer, Munoz has a bachelor’s degree from MIT Boston and is helping to develop the evolving self-driving car project at Jaguar-Land Rover. The car of the future meets the sail of the present.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This is not a play on words but the reality on which the research work expressed by Munoz in close collaboration with the design team and crew was articulated. “The most exciting part of this project lies precisely in the management and ability to analyze useful data to improve the boat’s performance. All while taking into consideration the many intervening variables that can impact hull performance. Suffice it to say that if you sail a boat on two different days, given the same conditions, you end up with completely different values. By resorting to machine learning, and with the support of artificial intelligence, we then set ourselves the goal of analyzing this huge amount of data to find the answers we need,” Munoz adds. There can be no margin for error when dealing with 15-meter-long boats that fly in the true sense of the word at over 85 kilometers per hour thanks to the action of a rigid sail that is the shape and size of a Boeing 737 wing.

THE FORMULA ONE OF SAILING
Some have called the America’s Cup something very similar to Formula One. “True. The similarities are many.”, comments Martin Whitmarsh, Ceo of Team Land Rover BAR and 25 years of experience in Formula One, many of them as team principal of McLaren. “The search for performance, the use of refined materials are just some of the aspects that connect these two worlds,” Whitmarsh continues. What makes the difference, however, is one substantial aspect: in Formula One, single-seaters race following a well-defined track, and the greater the grip, the better the car’s setup will be. In contrast, in the America’s Cup everything will come down to the ability to minimize friction by literally flying the hull over the surface of the water within a race course where there are no tracks to follow and on which external factors such as swell and wind intervene. Easy to say but very complex in reality when dealing with a hull of this power with a displacement of a few tons speeding at 85 km/h. Here, then, the project is enriched with new content related to aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, and the human-machine interface, making the line between the worlds of cars and sailing ever thinner. An issue, this one, on which Land Rover has been very vocal.

THE X-RAY WING
The British manufacturer’s engineers worked on the giant wing, more than 23 meters high, with all the knowledge of aerodynamics and computer technology gained in designing cars, including the new Discovery. In detail, thanks to a special program, it was possible to explore and analyze in detail the dynamic performance of the wing, observing 80 million computational cells in each test, which will provide decisive results for the best performance. “This process is similar to what we employ at Jaguar Land Rover to study vehicle response at high speeds,” says Tony Harper, Director of Research at Jaguar Land Rover. “In that case, our goal,” Harper continues, “is to minimize the effects of aerodynamic deformation on the surfaces of the car to limit fuel consumption.”

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