MDO in America's Cup Design

The AC 75 has two side t-shaped foils. The foil arm is connected to the hull through a moving joint which allows the crew to move the foil in and out of the water according to the sailing mode and tack. At the other end, the foil arm is attached to the foil wing which is the part that delivers the vast majority of the hydrodynamic lift. The foil wing has a main profile section coupled with moving flaps. Internally, enough space must be guaranteed for the systems to operate the flaps.

The design of foils is a challenging task since it involves the simulation of different geometries in different configurations and multiple operating conditions, which, then, determine boat performance.

modeFRONTIER has been chosen as the optimization tool to streamline and automate the design process, perform optimization as well as analyze and post-process results. The developed workflow was able to handle geometry changes and iterate through different configurations to obtain a global performance parameter. This was repeated for different operating conditions to obtain the matrix to be transferred to the VPP software.