Sailing Yacht Foil Design, a Comparison Between Vortice Lattice Method and CFD RANS Simulations

The increasing interest in foiling sailing yachts, recently driven by the American’s Cup, led to a wider application even in small boats such as dinghies or windsurfing. Foiling seems to be recent but since the early twenty-century years, hydrofoils has been experimented in Italy. This paper shows the complete foil design process starting from classical wing design based on theoretical consideration and illustrating the importance of modern simulation environments in design processes. Commercial CFD code Ansys Fluent® has been used and the results have been compared with those obtained through ad hoc developed vortice lattex method software, showing a substantial agreement with RANS simulation and theoretical calculation in front of incredible time reduction for simulation process that would allow a numerical planform optimization in a reasonable time. The case study focuses on the boat LED from the University of Palermo racing yearly in the framework of the 1001VELAcup® international university sailing challenge.