A-Class: Scheurer G7 new rudder development
Andy Scheurer established a partnership with the Caviezel brothers, Sandro & Daniel , both with professional Engineering background, to develop the G7, which was the step the Swiss yard took towards the new foiling mode in the A-Class. (Check full background at their interview).
Daniel runs also a proprietary simulation software used by the Scheurer camp for their inhouser R&D. Below Sandro commnets on the new G7 rudders & winglets:
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Sandro Caviezel: “Our first built rudder blade had some ventilation issues. Ventilation was not considered in our CFD simulation as it is a very complex topic and to simulate it properly you need a lot of time and resources. But after building expensive moulds with a section that was critical for ventilation (as we noticed after the first test rides) we had to rethink about this topic.
We modified the CFD to include the models needed to simulate ventilation. As a reference, we always had the Rudder from 2014 (the short one from Exploder) which was working really well. (First pic you can see the reproduced ventilation problem on our first built rudder.)
The ventilation cfd tests process was a very time-consuming task where we learned plenty of lessons to decide to go for another design.
Finally, we got our new rudder working really well, there is no more ventilation and because of the extra length you’re never running out of rudder again.
Finding the right section for the rudder was one of the issues for the whole rudder-project. In a next recap I will give you some addtional information about rudder blade, case stiffness, ruder hangings and height adjustment (while sailing) of the blade”.
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