Favourable winds and waves are important but not enough to race for the America’s Cup. It needs a combination of a high tech yacht and tactical expertise to win the preliminary races and the Cup itself. BMW ORACLE Racing, one of the top challengers, is using PTC technology to design, manage and optimize the product development data for the boat that will eventually sail against the Swiss Alinghi team in the 32nd America’s Cup in 2007 in Valencia, Spain.

While these high-tech racing yachts require multi-million dollar budgets and tens of thousands of hours of engineering time, the R&D costs take much of the budget. There are a lot of similarities between the premier league of sailing and motor sports which do not stop at the multi-million dollar budgets: Just like race cars, yachts need to be very stable and light at the same time. Their lightweight design is required to achieve high speeds, and stability is needed to control two forces of nature: water and wind.

Eleven teams from nine nations have lined up to win the oldest sports trophy of the world, but only one will have the chance to take the wind out of the sails from last year’s America Cup winner Alinghi. After this year’s preliminary Valencia Louis Vuitton Acts, BMW ORACLE Racing is among the three challengers best positioned to win the world’s most famous sailing competition. The 32nd edition of these races take place next summer and the designers of all the teams are working feverishly to deliver the perfect boat. Three teams participating in the America’s Cup, including BMW ORACLE Racing, rely on PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER design software, which is a proven 3D CAD software also in the automotive industry and in motor sports. “This design software helps us shorten development times,” said Ian Burns, Design Coordinator at BMW Oracle Racing. “Automation is the key to compressing manual processes that used to take two to three weeks down to only a few minutes.”

The challenges are many when designing an Americas Cup yacht: There is almost nothing you can buy – everything has to be designed from scratch in a limited time frame, which requires maximum creativity and the capacity to incorporate input from various disciplines and locations to the design process. The BMW ORACLE Racing team is geographically dispersed over four countries in three different continents. Headquarters and the main development site are located in the US, but most of the mast, rig and sail design is done in Auckland, New Zealand whereas the manufacturing is done at BMW sites such as in Eisenach (keels), Germany. Finally the sailing team testing the equipment is based in Valencia, Spain.

Intensive High-tech driven testing
The America’s Cup is often compared with the Formula 1 car racing competition due to its high tech characteristics and the ongoing design work throughout the racing season. The design team is using the most advanced software tools available to design and optimize the shape of the hull, the keels, the bulbs, the masts and the sails while experimenting with the most sophisticated materials available to make the boat as robust and light as possible. Though the overall design of the “USA-87” yacht is finished, the preparatory races for the America’s Cup as well as the internal test races show whether the technical effort was worthwhile and where design modifications are still to be done. Since computer simulation cannot substitute intensive testing on the water, skipper Chris Dickson’s sailing crew is on the sea racing two boats against each other as often as possible in order to optimize the yacht for the upcoming series of match races.

There is no communication with the shore crew during the races, but dozens of sensors on the boat read all kind of criteria providing insights into how the yacht is handling in different racing conditions. For example, cameras at the top of the mast take photos of the sails and pick the stripes on the sails with optical recognition software and sensors provide hydraulic pressure data. All this information is fed into a database and evaluated at the end of each day during a post-sail brief with the boat crew and the technical staff. A lot of data deciphering has to be done to realize a minimal fraction of a mile per hour faster.

Optimizing a yacht for the America’s Cup is more complex than trying to make the yacht as fast as possible for only one race because these boats compete against each other in many match races. “You do not have to be the fastest around the race course, you just have to beat the other team,” explains BMW ORACLE Racing’s Burns. “There are a lot of tactics. Some teams might optimize around a particularly fast boat sailing upwind whilst sacrificing speed downwind. Other teams may optimize on a slower but more movable boat in order to out maneuver the other team.” When optimizing the keels and other underwater components, the designers have to take into consideration possible wind and weather conditions for a particular competition with the hope of an accurate forecast, because the teams are not allowed to change the configuration of the boat once the match races have started.

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