JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Special Issue Composites for mobility - May 2020 - 51

APPLICATION sailing cruise ship

The future of navigation:
a stiff sail made of jointed composite panels
Invented and patented by the Chantiers de l'Atlantique
shipyards, Solid Sail is a high-performance, foldable and
100%-composite sail, the surface area of which can surpass a thousand square metres. It is designed to propel
Silenseas new-generation sailing cruise ships, but could
also be of interest to the fishing and yachting sectors.

ith the help of innovative
companies in the vanguard
of creative thought like
Chantiers de l'Atlantique, the mobility of tomorrow is also on the marine
horizon. Here are some of the projects.
Early this year, Solid Sail, the hightech sail developed by shipbuilder
Chantiers de l'Atlantique, was tested
along with its rigging on the southern
seawall of Pornichet Harbour (France)
over a period of some three months.
The purpose of the test was to validate
the design for a stiff sail made of jointed
composite panels that can fold down
automatically and without flapping.
Due to the composite panel construction, the sail would have a very long
service life.
Sea trials
The concept was developed and patented by Chantiers de l'Atlantique.
After two demonstrator sails were tested at sea in 2016 and 2017, the project
moved on to focus on a product that
would be as efficient as a standard flexible sail, but cheaper and five times as
durable.

Land-based tests
The next objective was to validate a second-generation Solid Sail along with its
aerorig on a reduced-scale (1/5) model. The aerorig's unguyed mast had to

be able to rotate 360° to adapt to wind
direction. A 15-metre high model was
designed with the appropriate instrumentation to reproduce the mechanical and aerodynamic behaviour of the
rigging on these future ships. The test
programme included perfecting the instrumentation and control system for
the aerorig and its sails to enable fully
automated operation.
The Pornichet Harbour seawall was
chosen as location, due to its exposure
to unimpeded winds, a necessary condition to ensure the reliability of the
tests.
It took about ten days for the Chantiers
de l'Atlantique and Multiplast teams to
raise and fine-tune the sail-support rigging. Multiplast is the project's indus-

trial partner, and other partners participated in specific areas of expertise: the
engineering company Méca; the design office Awentech; Avel Robotics,
a specialist in robotized composite
application; the school of engineering for advanced techniques ENSTA
Bretagne; G-Sea Design, a composite
design office; and Ocean Data System
(ODS) for the onboard electronics.
The rigging was used as a test bench for
Solid Sail until the month of February.
This innovative project is financed
by Chantiers de l'Atlantique, with the
support of European Funds (rigging financed by the LeanShips project) and
the European Regional Development
Fund (ERDF) through the Pôle Mer
Bretagne for the Solid Sail 2.0 programme.

Silenseas new-generation sailing cruise ship

SPECIAL ISSUE Mobility / May 2020 /

jec composites magazine

JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Special Issue Composites for mobility - May 2020

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