Article: It’s plain sailing for DASYLab

Vosper Thornycroft called on the expertise of Adept Scientific’s data acquisition team for a critical part of the construction of the largest single-masted sailing vessel in the world, as NIGEL TREVARTHEN explains.

It’s almost too much to take in the sheer scale of Mirabella V: once assembled, its mast will be 90m tall – to give you an idea of what that means, the yacht will certainly not be visiting London, as the draught of the huge Queen Elizabeth II bridge at Dartford is ‘only’ 54m! Technicians work on one of the many sections of the carbon fibre composite mast, the largest of which is 50m long. The volume of carbon fibre composite required makes it essential that it’s produced perfectly first time – which is where Adept Scientific’s data acquisition team were called in to help.

The hull of Mirabella V dwarfs a double-decker bus. Its mast is 50% taller than any other ever built, and
the carbon-fibre technology required six months of testing at NPL. When it came to ‘cooking’ the mast sections, the Adept Scientific team contributed by supplying and overseeing the critical temperature control and monitoring system.

Building an oven big enough to cure the mast was out of the question, so a special mould was built, containing heating blankets and monitored by 200 thermocouples. The signals are sent to two PCs via eight DataShuttle USB units, and an MCC digital I/O card controls the 20 separate heating zones, which have a total load of over 50kW. The Adept Scientific data acquisition team was able to supply and configure the correct system with the minimum of fuss, leaving the Vosper Thornycroft engineers to get on with tackling the other problems of what’s been described as ‘redefining big’.

Mirabella V will be the world’s largest sloop. Start saving: it’ll be available for hire next year.

Mirabella V has accommodation for 16 crew, and look carefully at the stern, where amongst those tiny vessels housed there is a 29ft tender!

Mirabella V is costing an estimated US$45M to build, and sailing trials are due to start before the end of this year. It’s an extraordinary project, and Adept Scientific has been excited to have played a small part in it