I Xent Case Study

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iXent

MARINE & OFFSHORE

Challenge:
•	 Competitive sailing requires robust part design
in order to withstand the higher loads placed on
the boat and its components during aggressive
racing. At the same time, the designs must be
as lightweight as possible to remain within
race-class weight requirements. Advanced
engineering company iXent was called on by the
owner of racing sailboat Alegre 3 to contribute
to strengthening and lightweighting a key
component design.

Solution:
•	 iXent used Tosca Structure, Isight and Abaqus
to develop a design for a winch gear that would
undergo extreme stress during operation.

Benefits:
•	 The company was able to deliver a highly optimized
part design that had not previously been explored.
SIMULIA’s products enabled them to quickly
consider alternative designs and arrive at the best
solution.

The graceful swoop of a racing sailboat through ocean waters
is a compelling sight. There’s the slice of streamlined bow
through the waves, the dramatic shift of massive sails, the
side-to-side rush of the crew as the boom swings and the
boat comes about—and the flurry of “coffee grinder” teams
frantically winding the winches to drive the rope lines that finetune the whole performance.
The manpower that makes those winches work is impressive:
Two sailors, facing each other, grab and turn a pair of handles
together at breakneck speed. The rotational force they generate
is transferred through a gear to a large winch controlling
a variety of running-rigging lines. These lines—halyards,
downhauls, sheets, etc.—are either tightened or released by
a whole series of deck-top winches that change the position
of the sails and boom. A recreational sailboat employs lighter,
one-handed winches, but it’s a different story on a racing boat,
where up to six two-person teams must supply the manual
energy that drives all the vessel’s key working components.
“The more aggressively you sail these racing boats the higher
the loads on the winch-gear structure get,” says Thomas Hahn,
founding partner of iXent, a German technology consulting
and engineering services company that specializes in applied
lightweight engineering of composite materials. He should
know: Hahn and co-founder Christoph Erbelding helped design
components for the U.S.’s Oracle Team USA sailboats that won
two America’s Cup championships.

Why two aeronautical engineers designed a
yacht winch
Although now known for their sailboat expertise, Hahn and
Erbelding originally trained as aeronautical engineers—and
then went on to spend years in the automotive industry. It
was their Munich location (close to Audi, BMW and Mercedes),

and iXent’s extensive (and still ongoing) advanced automotive
composites work, that led to their being chosen to join the
Oracle Team USA “technical competence” team in 2004 by
BMW, a sponsor of the America’s Cup. iXent’s profile in hightech yacht racing evolved rapidly from there as Oracle Team
USA went on to win both the 2010 and 2013 Cups; they are
currently working with the 2017 team.
Of course the yachting world is a vast one, with hundreds of
races held around the globe in a wide variety of classes based
on length, hull type, rigging, etc. A key race for owner-drivers
of the larger boats (the Maxis, above 72 feet long), the Rolex
Maxi Worlds, has been held at the Costa Smeralda Yacht Club
in Porto Cervo, Italy, every September for 35 years. A “MiniMaxi” competition for “smaller” maxi boats was added in 2010.
Regardless of length, the Maxis are all known for pushing the
boundaries of design and technological innovation.
The owner of one Mini-Maxi, the Alegre 3 (24 meters), became
a client of iXent when a colleague they’d worked with on
the 2010 Oracle team, winch specialist Jon Williams of Stay
In Phase Ltd., recommended iXent’s capabilities. The Alegre
team was looking to fine-tune design and weight to help
overcome the second-place finishes they’d had to settle for in
the previous two years at Porto Cervo.
Every area on the boat was open to review, leading to some
significant developments. The ramp deck was made into a
continuous surface from cockpit floor to foredeck, creating
an unbroken load path that increased the stiffness. The keel
fin was bolted to a keel tower internally to further maximize
stiffness and produce the biggest possible righting moment.
To accommodate the increased loads on the rigging due to
all that added stiffness, Williams asked iXent to reimagine
the winch design—making it more robust while taking out
as much weight as possible. The primary winches needed to
be placed in the optimal location for the trimmers, on pods
which incorporated the winch gears into vertical shafts for
maximum rigidity.

Simulation leads to tougher, lighter designs
iXent focused on the support plate that holds everything
in place inside each winch shaft. Many other gear-support
designs Hahn had seen were just flat, circular plates highly
susceptible to bending and twisting under excess stress. “The
plate has to be really, really strong,” he says. “I’ve seen this in
reality: a weak support starts bending and wiggling around.

“We see the whole simulation package
as a big help. If you don’t use it you will
be left behind. These digital tools
definitely support us in making our
experience-based decisions.”
— Thomas Hahn, founding partner of iXent

If the support deflects, the whole drivetrain locks up and you
can’t move your mainsail.”
So how to go about designing the optimum winch-gear
support for the Alegre? While iXent applied its own extensive
industry knowledge, and several proprietary techniques they’d
rather not discuss, Hahn is happy to name some of the
simulation tools his group depended on to guide much of their
innovation: from the SIMULIA portfolio, Tosca Structure (for
non-parametric topology optimization); Isight (for process
automation and parametric optimization); and Abaqus (for
finite element analysis). Their primary CAD tool was Dassault
Systèmes’ CATIA.
“We see the whole simulation package as a big help,” says Hahn.
“The simulation process chain we have here basically covers
everything from conception up to detailing. Our customers
know we are using cutting-edge technology. If you don’t use
it you will be left behind. These digital tools definitely support
us in making our experience-based decisions.”
That experience dictated that the plate be made from composite
materials. “You always push for your designs to be as light as
possible because these boats have to really fly nowadays
and, in the case of Alegre, the class rule limits your maximum
weight,” says Hahn. “So with any component, if you can
design something lighter with composites, you should do it.
Even just leaving off a few grams, multiplied over several parts,
can add up to a significant weight difference.”

Winch gear (red) and support (grey and white) inside shaft. Winch (not
shown) is at top.

Tackling the durability challenge required additional assessment
of just what sort of loads the winches would experience during
a racing event. “Six crew members on three winches can
produce up to 1200 newton meters when they’re sheeting in
a mainsheet sail—that’s like generating a load greater than the
weight of three mid-sized cars,” says Hahn. “Another way of
looking at it is that 1200 Nm is about three times the torque
moment of modern three-liter diesel engines, which are known
for their optimal torque production.”

Tosca fuels imagination, innovation—
and “the Batman”
With load estimates in hand, the team was ready to perform a
non-parametric analysis of the problem using Tosca. “We like to
think differently about every design problem we take on,” says
Hahn. “We say, ‘Let’s think innovatively about it’—and this is
why we use Tosca. You define a structure which is essentially
a black box at the beginning. You add in your anticipated load
cases—top, bottom, up to as many as ten.
“Even as an experienced engineer, I can’t fully imagine what
the optimum structure is in terms of where I can save weight
and where I have to add material in. But Tosca automatically
runs through all the possibilities to give you a meshed, almost
Rorschach-like pattern that identifies the most efficient
structure.”
Because the initial Tosca result bore a strong resemblance to
the Bat Signal projected into the sky to call the Caped Crusader
to the rescue, the team affectionately dubbed the new winch
support design “The Batman.”

An initial design space for a winch gear support plate optimization
exercise. Designs that stay with such a flat, circular shape can be
susceptible to warping under the high stresses of competitive sailing.

Next the team rebuilt their Tosca geometry in CATIA, refining it
further into a 3D CAD representation. They then used the preprocessor ANSA (from Beta CAE) to extract an executable file
into Abaqus, setting up a system of torques and moments that
represented the envelope of loads the part would see during
operation.

Isight and Abaqus optimize composites design
Finally the team employed Isight to automatically drive a
series of Abaqus FEA analyses toward an optimized composite
laminate design that had the least possible weight but satisfied
all the required boundary conditions. “You can’t do this
degree of optimization by hand,” says Hahn. “You might have
intuition, but it’s really amazing how these tools squeeze out
the last bit of weight savings from your laminates.”

The final Batman design achieved a weight savings of around
17% compared to a typical such component in a racing
yacht. And—coincidentally or not—the Alegre, with its newly
optimized winch gear supports, won the Mini-Max competition
in 2014.

Winning takes a team
Preferential

Non-preferential

More
evenly
distributed
Thin
at

(Left) iXent’s first Tosca
iteration of the sailboat gear support and (Right)
corners
the final output.

Mapped Thickness Distribution (<0.5mm range)

(Top) Final drawings for the Batman winch-gear support plate design.
Note phalanges along outer edges (upper right image) that provide
additional stiffness. (Bottom) A finished Batman composites component.

Interestingly enough, Tosca can also contribute to
a determination of composite orientation later on in the
production process, Hahn notes. “Tosca basically creates a
truss/bridge type of structure that uses the least amount of
material to minimize bending. Of course, composites work in
much the same way: Their fiber orientation is strongest along
the length of the fiber, in either compression or tension. So
why not use Tosca to design a composite laminate, because the
principles are the same.”

Hahn is a busy man, and was pleasantly surprised to hear of the
win some months after it happened. “I don’t think you win by
being strong in just one field,” says Hahn. “You win by having
the best total ‘package’—very good sailors, very good shore
support and, of course, good design. In this case our client
really likes the final Batman solution, which is both light and
strong. If you go at every part on your boat with those goals
surely you would end up with the optimum design package.”
That winning attitude helps iXent bring their Tosca expertise to
bear on a variety of weight reduction challenges faced by their
automotive and manufacturing-automation clients as well.
“While the Batman example is a nice demonstration of what
is possible, we also use Tosca for much bigger structures, like
topologies on larger parts of cars as well as boats,” says Hahn.
“You can use Tosca for almost any structure when you are not
clear what the most efficient shape looks like; Tosca sparks
your imagination and gets you out of your design rut.”

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