Title:	Sailing Dynamics
DNr:	SNIC 2019/3-102
Project Type:	SNIC Medium Compute
Principal Investigator:	Lars Larsson <lars.larsson@chalmers.se>
Affiliation:	Chalmers tekniska högskola
Duration:	2019-03-01 – 2020-03-01
Classification:	20303 20306
Homepage:	http://www.chalmers.se/CYRU
Keywords:

Abstract

Since 2015 Chalmers is a National Sports University with obligations to carry out research within Sports and Technology. Three areas have been selected: sailing, swimming and equestrian. This proposal is within sailing. The focus is on Olympic sailing, which is presently only done in dinghies. In a dinghy, the sailor weight is similar to that of the boat. Therefore the positioning and motions of the sailor in the boat have a profound influence on the hydrodynamics and aerodynamics of the dinghy. One objective of the present project is to optimize the sailor position and motions in Olympic dinghies both in flat water and in waves. This is an extremely complicated problem, including unsteady hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, coupled to rigid body motions and with fluid-structure interaction for the rig and sails. A second objective is to optimize the sailor equipment, such as hull, centreboard, rudder, sail, rig, etc within given tolerances. The first version of a numerical technique for sailing yacht performance prediction based on Computational Fluid Dynamics, strongly coupled to 6D rigid body dynamics is under development. The first version was presented in a Licentiate thesis in late 2016 and was further developed in 2017. More and more features will be included during the coming years. At present two PhD students are engaged in the sailing research. Their progress is strongly dependent on SNIC resources. Further, in the spring of 2019, there are three MSc projects underway in sailing. All three require massive computer resources and will rely on SNIC. In 2017 the sailing research generated two journal papers and four conference papers. In 2018 three journal papers were published, as well as one invited lecture at an international conference. SNIC's computer resources were a prerequisite for all this output. The sailing activities are coordinated under Chalmers Yacht Research Unit (CYRU). Note that there is an unbalance in the computer demand between spring and fall, due to the MSc projects during the spring.