Beyond the "design spiral": students chasing innovation at Audace Sailing Team

modeFRONTIER can be a game-changer even in the bustling environment of a student-led sailing challenge. During this talk, we’re going to dive into the experience of Audace Sailing Team, a university project focused on the design and construction of sustainable sailing prototypes. For us students, Audace is the first opportunity to embark on an actual design challenge, starting from a blank paper all the way down to the racing course.
Inside this “learn by doing” framework we have been exploring modeFRONTIER since the very beginning: the hull shape of our first 15 ft skiff, Dedalo, was the first case study with the aim to find the best tradeoff between hull drag and hydrostatic stability. The wooden hull of Dedalo, which proved to be fast and reliable, was then used as a plug for the following boats, Lina and Bai-Lina Rossa, made with a flax fiber-epoxy composite. After this positive experience, modeFRONTIER became a fundamental tool of our design process during the making of our first foiling dinghy, a flax fiber Moth called Bai-Flying Lina. We improved our knowledge of the software and then performed a multi-objective optimization of both hull and hydrofoils geometry. However, we could say that the most significant leap forward has been in our approach: this tool gave us the opportunity to switch from the traditional “design spiral”, to a multicriterial decision making framework. This approach was the key to develop, in a very short time, a sufficiently clear idea of how to design a foiling boat, something we knew very little about before. Thanks to modeFrontier we managed to earn a more complete and critical view of the design space, which was deeply explored to understand the meaning and importance of the different variables.
In this way, we saved precious time during the following stages of the design and building process: just 8 months after our initial design discussions we were there, in Garda lake , ready to foil!
Now, after our first win in a student-oriented foiling competition (SuMoth Challenge, July 2023), the team has moved forward to explore and develop further the Sustainable Moth project, continuously unlocking modeFRONTIER’s vast potential.