Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) is one of the world’s top sailing teams, having won the prestigious America’s Cup Regatta twice and coming very close to winning the latest regatta in 2013.
The 2013 America’s Cup Challenge made a shift to competing with a new class of 72ft catamaran (the AC72 class). This added a whole new dimension to sailing speeds and boat performance, which led to arguably the most exciting match racing ever witnessed with boat speeds approaching 50kts (93 km/h).
To perform effective structural analysis of the AC72, state of the art FEA software was required and it needed to be implemented correctly so that accurate results could be generated within tight engineering timeframes.
To this end ETNZ selected Abaqus FEA, backed up by the analysis experts at Matrix.
In addition to Matrix providing and supporting Abaqus FEA software to ETNZ, James Hamilton, Senior Engineering Analyst at Matrix, was seconded to ETNZ for 4 months in 2011 and provided on-going FEA support during the campaign. He helped develop the methodology required to make full use of Abaqus’ state of the art capabilities in composite modelling, nonlinear analysis, mechanisms and fluid-structural interaction.