Welcome to this blog of the TU Delft Hydro Motion Team. This year The Hydro Motion Team builds a hydrogen-powered boats. Our goal is to propel the maritime industry towards a sustainable future. After last year’s team became world champion in the Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, a race for sustainably powered boats, we had to come up with a new challenge to prove the power of hydrogen. Within one year we will design, build, test and sail our hydrogen-powered boat with the ultimate goal of crossing the North Sea between the Netherlands and the UK.

Another interesting feature of our boat is that we are going to foil: fly above the water using wings under the boat. For this, the weight of the boat is crucial. We want to minimise the weight. On the other hand, we focus on seaworthiness to ensure a safe crossing. So we also have to make it robust. These have to be balanced well. Using Finite Element Analysis, we will determine the number of layers of carbon of all parts in our design: the hull, bulkheads and stiffeners.

We will assess different load cases during the analyses. Common ones include for example standing on the deck, lifting the boat with a crane, sailing on water and slamming on waves. But foiling leads to different and more critical load cases, like static foiling, manoeuvring while foiling and slamming onto the waves from the foiling height. Femto Engineering, who has been our partner for many years, helped us to simulate this. They assisted in determining realistic load cases, in building up the model in Siemens’ Femap software and interpreting the results. Their expertise was invaluable  for our assessment.

On the basis of the results of our analysis, we could start production. Our Hull & Body engineers are now working hard on producing the hull and internals. For 10 weeks they will work at an external location and after that we will arrive back in the Dreamhall with our carbon hull. Make sure to read our next blog to hear about the results of production, and to see our beautiful boat of course!