IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/appene/v21y1985i4p289-300.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A human-powered hydrofoil racing-boat: Design and development

Author

Listed:
  • Owers, D.J.
  • Probert, S.D.

Abstract

A human-powered, hydrofoil-supported, racing boat has been designed, built, tested and developed. At relatively high speeds ([greater, approximate]4ms-1), this craft provides a more energy efficient means of transport than a conventional displacement hull. An athlete should be capable of powering such a hydrofoil boat through its [`]take-off' speed of approximately 3·6 ms-1, and then in its [`]foil-borne' mode of operation, be able to achieve record speeds exceeding 6·0 ms-1. The prototype hydrofoil-supported craft, built for this investigation, required about 287 W of effective power to [`]take-off', i.e. for the weight of boat plus driver to be entirely hydrofoil-borne, so that the hull was lifted completely out of the water. Due to employing an inappropriate propeller (of only ~57% efficiency) and at least 16% excess weight for the boat plus chosen human driver, he could power the craft only to 3·5 ms-1, at which speed the hull had risen so that all but the lowest 5 cm depth of it was above the water. With further developments human-powered hydrofoil craft will fully take off.

Suggested Citation

  • Owers, D.J. & Probert, S.D., 1985. "A human-powered hydrofoil racing-boat: Design and development," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 21(4), pages 289-300.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:21:y:1985:i:4:p:289-300
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306-2619(85)90013-3
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:21:y:1985:i:4:p:289-300. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.