AssetID: 53277003
Headline: RAW VIDEO: Student Engineering Whizzes Readying SP80 Boat For Tilt At Sailing Speed Record
Caption: A group of 23 students from landlocked Switzerland are gearing up to break the world sailing speed record next year. The students, from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), make up almost half of the SP80 team - who aim to use a boat with a kite attachment to smash the existing record of 65.45 knots (121.21 km/h). SP80’s sailors, who are headquartered in the scenic coastal town of Leucate in southern France, aim to achieve an incredible speed of 80 knots (150 km/h) when they take to the waves off Rouet beach next year. After years of hard work, the SP80 team has attached their innovative kite to their boat for the first time. It is the latest milestone for the around 50-person team, led by founders, Mayeul van den Broek, Benoît Gaudiot, and Xavier Lepercq. “If you’re committed to something and have ideas, then you’ll always find a way forward,” says its CEO, van den Broek. “Of course, it takes a lot of time and sacrifice, but you really can go far.” The students on the team include Tanguy Desjardin, the President of EPFL Lausanne’s SP80 association and a Master’s student in the final year of his mechanical engineering program. He says: “While breaking the record is our ultimate goal, we’re also building something together and absorbing a lot of information. We’re learning by doing, with the 'hands in the glue' you learn. All this is a real benefit to our education.” Desjardin has a particularly important role as he is currently head of the kite design group - and has seen numerous design changes while getting by “on little sleep.” “The kite is where we’ve got the most work to do,” he adds. “We need to engineer a structure that spans from 20 m² to 50 m² and that can withstand the forces generated by propelling the boat at ultra-high speeds.” Teammate Thomas Velin can help with this, as the Masters student in mechanical engineering developed a software program that can run rapid simulations of different kite shapes. “The whole process requires us to invent new things, think out of the box and break with convention. It’s R&D in its purest form,” he says. The SP80 boat is 10 meters long and 7.5 meters wide and has an incredibly sleek design with superventilating hydrofoils and parts that had never been created before. It was built by Persico Marine, an Italian yacht-building company. Through this feat of engineering, SP80 paves the way to entirely new forms of wind propulsion on regular vessels. Desjardin hopes their endeavours will help make transport more sustainable in the future. “It’s important for both the SP80 company and our student club to make sure the R&D continues even after our record-setting attempt,” says Desjardin. “We want to apply what we’ve learned to make maritime transport in general more sustainable.” For now, the SP80 team is focused on testing the new kite. They’ve spent the past few months integrating all systems into the boat and finalising its power module – a critical component that balances the upward force generated by the kite with the downward force produced by the main hydrofoil. The power module is both lightweight and can resist the stresses produced at high speeds. The boat’s two pilots will be van den Broek, who operates the main controls, and Gaudiot, who handles the kite.Their big task will be to practice sailing the boat at increasingly elevated speeds. The pilots must wear helmets and oxygen masks when they sail, and they’ve both completed safety training developed specifically for their boat, given by experts who also train helicopter pilots. “If the boat capsizes, it won’t break– but it will fill up with water,” says van den Broek. “So we’ve got to learn how to get out quickly if needed.” All in all, that’s a hell of a lot of work for both students and pilots before they plan to hit the water next year!
Keywords: sp80,boat,sailing,speed record,feature,photo,video,lausanne
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