The final report of Force project and Downwind Aero Moments on Phase 2C has been released by the Sailing Yacht Research Foundation (SYRF).

The report is published online and contains the complete details about the project. The project got completed under the guidance of researchers Michael Richelsen and JB Braun of North Design Services.

In this paper a multi-part study has been done that used fluid-structure interaction (FSI), modeling to create a publicly accessible set of results consist of all the forces and aerodynamic moments for an array of downwind sails, wind speeds and angles.

Phase 2C studied these effects at apparent wind angles. Interestingly, the findings of the research have profound implications for the spinnaker sheet trimming parametric changes.

To examine the paper in every aspect, a paper in companion has also been written. This paper examines the use of simulations of RANS in identifying optimal downwind sail trim more closely. Submission of this paper has been done and it is pending for publication.

As conceived, this project is the follow up of the SYRF Wide Light Project published in 2015. The project SYRF provided the research and design community a medium of monitoring and evaluating computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes. SYRF believes that researchers and designers can once again come together to improve CFD’s ability understanding, this to correctly predict the performance of light and wide. This is the reason SYRF made rig dimensions and hull surface files public.

In-order to promote this association, SYRF has joined hands and partnered with Innov’ Sail 2017. The Chairman of SYRF Steve Benjamin spoke about this development and said, “For us, this is really an exciting time. After years of research and planning, the project is finally complete and this has yielded meaningful and interesting results as well, the result which is embraced by the global design and research community.