Pressure Distribution on Yacht Sails

What is it about?

Air pressure measurements on yacht sails are a valuable resource for validation of any sail analysis or design program. Yet, not much sail pressure data of high quality is available. To close this gap we present an innovative design for rigid model sails to be used in wind tunnel experiments to obtain the lacking sail pressure data. The results from a set of prototype sails (AC33) are presented and compared to the results from numerical calculations (lifting line and vortex lattice codes).

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Wind tunnel experiments to study sail pressure often face a dilemma: the model sails have to be thin to resemble real sails. Yet they have to be stiff enough to retain a known shape to relate the resulting pressure map to. Moreover, the sails have to house a multiple pressure taps. The design presented here yields thin, yet rigid model sails for wind tunnel use. The prototype sails (t<4mm) house over 200 independent pressure tubes on a sail designed for a model mast height of 2.2 meter.