Rig

The increasing size of sailing superyachts, their rising costs, a growing focus on safety have led designers, shipyards and ship owners to no longer underestimate the importance of this issue.
Today, a new approach is possible thanks to novel commercial analytical tools that, until a few years ago, were only available to America’s Cup Syndicates.

Service Details

Rig design rules have mostly been developed by failure observation. The most common observed:

• High percentage varies over the life cycle of the system (early, random, wear out)
• Lack of proper maintenance
• Captains and crews are not aware of critical information
• Wave induced inertial loads are sometimes of the same order of magnitude as aerodynamic loads.

Deliverables

Rina uses an analytical approach developed by SMAR Azure Ltd: RigEdge®, completely integrated finite element software enabling the user to design any type of sailing yacht rig and predict its structural behaviour under tuning and sailing loads.
With RigEdge, it is possible to:

• Accurately define spars, rigging and sailplan
• Automatically develop the aerodynamic sail meshes and finite element models for sails and rig
• Calculate: tuning loads sailing loads, and rig deformation and loads

The complete integration of design, mesh and analytical tools included in RigEdge enables the system to define rig loads in an efficient and accurate way.
In collaboration with RINA, SMAR Azure has developed the DYNAMIC module of RigEdge. This module allows the user to evaluate the structural behaviour of the rig under the inertial loads caused by the vertical acceleration due to impact on waves.
Using this computational tool, RINA has analysed a group of test cases to define the RINA approach to rig certification.