30 days after the departure of the 10th Vendee Globe edition from Les Sables d’Olonnes, the leaders of the race have passed Cape Leeuwin. Soon, the other skippers of the fleet will start to make their way under Australia towards the longitude of Tasmania and then the South of New-Zealand.
The Vendée Globe being a challenge for sailing techniques and human endurance, but also for advanced boat design, several participants have decided to integrate our simulation software Gomboc Designer in their design loop and training processes.
As a result, we are very proud to share that Gomboc is part of this legendary adventure as several of the leading IMOCAs have been designed by Guillaume Verdier and Antoine Koch & Finot-Conq, both using Gomboc Designer intensively. See current ranking of the Vendée Globe on the race’s official website.
Notably, one major advantage of the software for those teams is its capability to capture both foil hydrodynamics and foil deformations using a Fluid-Structure Interactions loop. A close collaboration with Antoine Koch’s team has recently led to significant improvements in Gomboc with:
– an improved cavitation model taking into account lift loss in addition to the drag penalty
– a new ventilation model enabling to model the successive ventilating, ventilated, rewetting and rewet states of the foil based on the percentage of the span being likely to ventilate/rewet.
Below is a simulation made by Thomas Dalmas at Akocean showing the ventilation effect on the foil of one of the IMOCA designed by Antoine Koch & Finot Conq. The ‘VentSpanPct’ overlay indicates the percentage of the port foil which is likely to ventilate.
