FSI investigation on stability of downwind sails with an automatic dynamic trimming

Gennakers are lightweight and flexible sails, used for downwind sailing configurations. Qualities sought for this kind of sail are propulsive force and dynamic stability. To simulate accurately the flow surrounding a sail, several problems need to be solved. Firstly, the structural code has to take into account cloth behavior, orientation and reinforcements. Moreover, wrinkles need to be taken into account through modeling or fine enough discretization. Secondly, the fluid solver needs to reproduce the atmospheric boundary layer as an input boundary condition, and be able to simulate separation. Thirdly, the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) is strongly coupled due to the lightness and the flexibility of the structure. The added mass is three orders of magnitude greater than the mass of the sail, and large structural displacement occur, which makes the coupling between the two solvers difficult to achieve. Finally, the problem is unsteady, and dynamic trimming is important to the simulation of gennakers (Graf and Renzsch, 2006). As the FSI procedure is detailed in Durand (2012), the present work is rather focused on its application to downwind sail stability.