A professor from the Thayer School of Engineering is currently working with IBM and Fluent Inc. -- a Lebanon software company -- to design sails intended to help the United States win the 2000 America's Cup yacht race.
Thayer Professor Horst Richter is researching in conjunction with Thayer student Ron Ross and Jeff Shoreman '97.
Richter and his staff are actually part of a larger group whose goal is to bring the America's Cup back to the U.S., since a New Zealand yacht won the competition in 1995.
Peter Runstadler, Director of Applications Consulting at Fluent, Inc. said, "We're sort of a group working together to make it happen."
PACT2000 -- a syndicate of the New York Yacht Club, which is working to solicit donations for research and development of the yacht -- is funding and coordinating the project.
Richter, who also teaches the undergraduate class, Engineering Sciences 2: The Technology of Sailing, said PACT2000 approached IBM to gain access to their superior technology.
"We need a lot of computer power because there are a lot of complex computations," he said. "This is a high-tech sport -- there is a lot of technology involved."
Richter said IBM will donate workstations which connect to a larger, more powerful computer through the Internet. The work stations will be primarily at Thayer, but Richter and his staff will also have access to some computers at Fluent.
Fluent, Inc. is also contributing software and manpower.
Richter said he became interested in the yacht sails after the 1995 defeat by New Zealand.
The United States had previously dominated the America's Cup competition, but "in the finals, we didn't win a single race," he recalled. After the Americans lost, Richter said he started computations on old America's Cup yacht sails and obtained a grant to continue his research.
He discussed the lack of American sail performance with Olin Stephens, a retired partner in Spartman and Stephens -- a firm which designed several yachts which have sailed in past America's Cup races.
Stephens said he is interested in working on the sail problem because recent research has centered on hulls instead of sail technology.
Stephens said they are most interested in the sail's fluid dynamics. "We want to try to study the shape that will give them the best driving power," he said.
Though the Thayer group is devoting much of its time to the project, the yachts are not likely to be built at Thayer -- and therefore not tested locally.
The project is still very much in the research phase, Richter said, since the 2000 competition is still more than three years away. Much of the research rests on the principle that sail performance can in fact be predicted by using computers. Runstadler said in the past, sail technology has been optimized by trial and error -- but with computer technology, engineers can study and change sail design inside the lab.
