team photo

Figure 1
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Figure 2
project photo


Team 37

Team Members

Faculty Advisor

Jonathan Denman
Sean Quinlan
Ryan McCarthy
My Nguyen

Vito Moreno

Sponsor

Other

sponsored by
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Wind Control Device on a High Performance Power Boat

Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats is a manufacturer of high performance luxury racing boats. They are based in Bristol, Rhode Island and have been an industry leader since their inception in 1993. They manufacture both catamaran and deep-vee hull vessels. The boat in question for the project is the SC-37 Catamaran style boat with a top speed of 125 MPH. This boat has an open top design and seats 6 passengers. The company tasked us with designing, fabricating, and demonstrating a device that would reduce the wind buffeting felt by rear-seat passengers when cruising at high speeds, without affecting the overall drag coefficient or top speed of the vessel. They also asked us to ensure that the wind control device was transparent and either retractable or detachable with the ability to easily store it within the rear lockers that are already on the boat. We brainstormed a handful of possible wind control devices and ran our ideas by the sponsor. They gave us feedback on our designs and we were able to eliminate a few of them from consideration and move forward with the refinement and development of the others. We then took our design considerations and made CAD models so that we would run CFD analysis in ANSYS as well as 3D-print the wind control devices so that we would attach them to our scale 3D-printed boat model and compare our analytical results with our experimental results. We compared velocity and pressure differentials with and without the devices present. From here, we selected the best wind control devices and passed our ideas on to the sponsor to pursue.