Hydrofoil sailing has been able to unlock performance characteristics previously confined to speed records, making them available to multiple racing fora. The America’s Cup is now regularly sailed at 40 knots, Moth sailing dinghies and A-Class catamarans achieve up to 30 knots on standard race courses. The systems employed to achieve these speeds have been refined to such an extent that high speeds are regularly attained. However, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the fundamental hydrodynamic phenomena to enable safe control of these machines and continued increases in performance. For example, arbitrary ventilation pathways have been noticed and yet are not fully explained. This paper provides the means to unlock the methods of quantitatively establishing a pathway for arbitrary ventilation and for measuring the flow regime complexity around such foils. These two methods have been developed over many years by the collaborators mentioned in this paper. The result is a valuable contribution to capability available to the sailing research community. An additional two methods of experimental analysis have been detailed within the paper.

The aim of this work is to investigate the contribution of those “non-structural” components to the hull strength in order to evaluate their effect on the stress and deformation distribution of a large sailing yacht. Two different finite element models of a 94 ft sailing yacht, with and without “non structural components”, have been carried out with a very high level of detail in order to evaluate the outfit and furniture contribution to the primary hull response. 

The new America's Cup Class Rule specifies a modern, light weight, fast monohull sloop somewhere between an IOR Maxi and an ULDB. The performance of the boat will be highly sensitive to weight, thus there is a premium on optimization of the structure. The structural section of the rule calls for a thin skin sandwich laminate with minimum skin and core thicknesses and densities, as well as maximum core thickness, fiber modulus, and laminate cure temperatures . This paper presents the initial phases of material selection, structural analysis and design, and manufacturing engineering in the development of a competitive America's Cup Class Yacht.