Softwing

Dear all, It's been quite a while since you have heard of us! For an update on what's new at Softwing, a complete summary of our journey and inventions, and access to interesting technical details, please visit our new website:

index - Soft-Wing ___ Innovative Flexible Wing Sails Cambrer Original version 1 SoftWing Flexible Wing Sails offer increased sailing performance, simplified maneuvering but mostely improve the sail reactivity compared to conventional rigs and sails. And unlike rigid wing sails they can be hoisted, lowered and reduced...

Throw Back Thursday. Little Cup - 1974: Wing Versus Sail

It was a first time in the Little Cup, and what a first. A wing replaced a normal sail. The Australian of "Miss Nylex" Bruce Proctor and Graeme Ainslie dominated the New Zealanders of "Miss Stars" 4-0.

The wing that was designed at the Sydney University was innovative and technically advanced. It was broken down in three separate vertical sections that could be adjusted depending on the wind speed and apparent wing angle at each level. The whole arrangement was controlled with an incalculable number of colored lines that the crew had to learn to trim. It was capable of rotating 180 degrees, giving the crew many more trimming possibilities.

Researchers Are Looking To A Surprisingly Old Idea For The Next Generation Of Ships: Wind Power In many ways, it’s an obvious solution. For many centuries, world trade over the oceans was propelled by wind power alone. Now that we’re seeking an alternative to the fossil fuel-burning vehicles that enable our modern standard of living, some people are turning again to renewable solutions such as…

A more detailed view of the "Scorpion" version, showing that each level of cambers is now composed of only two articulated elements, completed with the scorpion "winglet", resulting in significative material and rigging time reduction.

News from the latest "Scorpion" Version: end of 2014, SoftWing has improved its wing, following-up on the learnings gained with the F18 St. Trop experience and the T29 success. Basically, the new version tested in Switzerland this fall has demonstrated better performance upwind, improved overall power downwind, and last but not least, we managed to reduce the number of cambers by a factor of two. Which is great news in terms of cost effectiveness.

More info about SoftWing on T29 here:

soft cell Created by the team of wing designer from France (Hugues de Turckheim), wing camber builder from Switzerland (MB Composite), platform designer from Sweden (Stefan Törnblom), wing envelope sail maker from Sweden (Mats Johansson, Gransegel), and builder from Hungary (Pauger Composite), this ...

Fresh news from Sweden: after some fine tuning, the softWing rigged on KISS T29 is now performing great. On the picture here, the boat is sailing at 60° from a 12 knts wind, at a speed of 18 knts. Up-wind in the same conditions, the owner reports a 35° angle and 14 knts of speed. This is more than promising!

SoftWing's team is gone sailing for the summer: keep posted and see you end of August!

News from T29's SoftWing: Hoistable wingsail. 1148 kgs sailing weight. This is what the owner says about it: "The wing is working beautifully upwind with a great finesse. We point 10 degrees higher than a Farr 40 going faster and have 60-65 degrees between tacks. We still have not been able to generate the predicted power on open angles yet but will do some surgery on the cambers next week that will resolve this problem by generation of more camber. The most impressive is the low sheet loads, like 20 pounds compared to 3400 pounds for the conventionally rigged T29. We have a 1:2 purchase with optimist sized blocks. We can lie still just before starting line and 3 sec before gun we can produce power to project the boat over the line at full speed and pointing higher than anybody else, really disturbing for the other multihulls. Also the speed by which we can de power the rig when bearing off at high speed. We can also reverse the camber thus de powering completely. This is really what I projected when producing a retirement tri. There will be a teaser in Seahorse soon."

Up/down at anytime - here the very first application of a SoftWing for a racing-cruising program. Thanks for keeping posted.

A nice shot from Sweden: photo courtesy KISS Multihull AB T29

Gransegel and the riggers did an outstanding job with the SoftWing on T29! Congrats!