Numerical modelling of hydrofoiling sailboats

Despite the growing interest in foiling technology with recent and increased media coverage of major sailing events and the vulgarization of foiling boards and crafts, the academic interest and the available studies on the behavior of such applications of foiling mechanics remain limited. This master thesis intends to provide a computationally fast but thorough three-dimensional numerical model of a fully hydrofoiling sailboat. The modelling of the boat’s forces will be detailed, implemented into the boat’s mechanical system and analyzed using a symbolic multibody approach provided by the Robotran software developed at UCLouvain. The present work is divided in two major parts. In a first step, models for each force interacting with the boat will be presented and discussed, with a special focus on the foils as they are the major component of interest of this study. Their interaction with the free surface will be thoroughly investigated. Then, through a quasi-static equilibrium analysis with Robotran, a parametric study on simplified 2 degree of freedom simulations and a validation case based on race data with the final 5 degree of freedom model will be presented.