h a l f b a k e r yAssume a hemispherical cow.
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Make sailboat sails weaker but sectioned off with stronger strips of material. This will save weight at the risk of breaking a section or two before the race ends.
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I dunno - how much weight would you save? |
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Also, my limited understanding of modern sails is
that they are very efficient aerofoils - losing a panel
would probably lower their performance
disproportionally. |
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So, if I'm reading [into] this correctly, you want sails made out of Mylar and reinforced with strips of Kevlar? That's an outstanding idea! I wonder why it isn't done already. |
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By Jove, You've got it. I do believe you've got it!
Skipper Paul Cayard was secretly testing this idea with spinnakers and jennikers a few America's cup races ago, ending up with pennants flying from the masthead, He had not yet arrived at the reinforced diddy bits but you can rest assured he would have...eventually.
Interestingly this led to the making of the epic Team America film named in honour of his yacht, Team America and, if you believe this, you will believe anything.
All stand please, for the President of the United States... Music. |
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Tricky... I'm not as well-versed in 'space-age materials' as I
am in more conventional materials, but one of the
fundamentals of metal fabrication is that if you make a
structure stronger at one point, you make it weaker
somewhere else. The idea is to balance the structural
features so that various forces (gravity, creep, strain, etc.)
acting on the structure do so as evenly as possible. |
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So a pressure valve for sails.
That's a tearific idea in that the failure is graceful and may save the placing. |
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//if you make a structure stronger at one point, you make it weaker somewhere else. The idea is to balance the structural features so that various forces (gravity, creep, strain, etc.) acting on the structure do so as evenly as possible// |
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I guess you are referring to stress points. But a truss is a counter example. |
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A truss is an excellent example of stress-point elimination.
I was trying to speak in general terms, since sail design is
not my forté, but it seems to me that "making sails weaker
but sectioned with stronger strips" will only create stress
points along the edges of the 'stronger strips'. If a flat
metal structure is reinforced with thick bands and then
subjected to multiple-axis strain, the welds along the
reinforment bands will split. Such a structure (again, made
out of metal, which I know something about, rather than,
er, sail material, which I know little about) would fare
much better if reinforced with something like angle iron or
a perpendicular support (known to fabricators as a
'stringer') rather than a flat band. The dynamics of a
flexible structure like a sail may be quite different, but I
figured some of the fundamental properties might apply to
both. |
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Interestingly, yachts use thin, flexible, slats of wood made from Canadian spruce, which are threaded into pockets sewn across the main sail to perform this task. |
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A movable bolster (or in the lexicon of metal fabricators, a
'floating' reinforcement) is an entirely different story; since
the supported structure can shift under the stringer, it
gains support without the weak points created by
attachment. |
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Quite so. ....Er.....What? |
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Because it is not attached, the movable bolster supports
the structure without constraining it to the shape of the
reinforcing element. |
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