A fast and robust approach to compute nonlinear Fluid-Structure Interactions on yacht sails

Matthieu Sacher (1, 2) , Jean-Baptiste Leroux (1, 2) , Alain Nême (1, 2) , Christian Jochum (1, 2)

1 ENSTA Bretagne - École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées Bretagne
2 IRDL - Institut de Recherche Dupuy de Lôme

A numerical method to compute the nonlinear Fluid-Structure Interactions (FSI) of yacht sails is presented in this paper. The inviscid lifting-line flow model is used by including a quadrature method to efficiently compute sail pressure loads. The structural calculation is performed with a quasi-static resolution by using a dynamic backward Euler scheme, in order to improve the computation convergence. A specific thickness sail approach is also proposed to make the FSI solving easier. The assembly of these flow and structural methods leads to a fast and robust strategy to compute nonlinear FSI on yacht sails, and the proposed approach is applied on a complex semi-rigid composite mainsail.

Keywords: Fluid; structure; numerical; fast; robust; sail; membrane

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Mechanics [physics.med-ph]; Structural mechanics [physics.class-ph]

Matthieu Sacher, Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Alain Nême, Christian Jochum. A fast and robust approach to compute nonlinear Fluid-Structure Interactions on yacht sails: Application to a semi-rigid composite mainsail. 24e Congrès Français de Mécanique, Aug 2019, Brest, France. ⟨hal-03271369⟩