Newsletter

March – Assembly

The past few weeks, the Vehicle Dynamics department worked in Vollenhove at Rondal to produce our hydrofoils. The hull arrived at the Dreamhall, which was amazing for the whole team and especially for the Hull and Body department. Now that the hull is in Delft, the team has been busy with assembling the boat. 

Hull and Body

The Hull and Body department worked on the hull for the past few months and on Wednesday, the 22nd of February, the moment was there to unload the boat from the mould. Because they worked towards this moment for the past two months, there was a healthy tension in the department. For the unloading itself, the Hull and Body department had to take ample of time because our boat has a difficult shape. In the end, the department unloaded the boat by running water between the mould and the hull. When the boat floated in the mould, they carefully lifted the hull out of the mould. The boat came out of the mould like a mirror; you can see each individual carbon fibre. It is great to see the result after two months of hard work, a big milestone for Hull and Body!

After the boat was unloaded, the team welcomed the boat to the Dreamhall. Now that the hull is in Delft the team could start placing parts in the boat. Hull and Body worked mostly on assembly and slowly the boat filled up more and more. Once all the major components were put in the boat, the Hull and Body department went back to Contest Yachts to attach the deck to the boat. After two days of hard work, the hull is now finished. Now that the deck is on the boat, the Hull and Body department will connect the hardware of the hydrogen system and they’ll put other small components in the boat.

Embedded Systems

In the last few weeks, the Embedded Systems department worked a lot on their design, production and assembly. They have designed and soldered all our PCB’s (Printed Circuit Boards), wrote a lot of code to program the chips on the PCB’s, produced battery modules for the buffer battery and performed big tests where they integrated all our systems together. The Embedded Systems department has made some big achievements: The newly produced buffer battery is working, the Brightloop step-down converter is converting the high voltage to lower voltage, the Maxon actuator motors for the foils are reacting to inputs from our sensors and most importantly; the electro motor, which will be used for the propulsion, is spinning when given inputs from the steer.

The Embedded Systems department works in an iterative process, when they discover things that need to change during assembly, they go back to their laptop to rewrite the code and to design and produce new PCB’s. At the moment, the Embedded Systems department is working hard at Van der Leun to put all components in watertight boxes from Phoenix Mecano. Afterwards, they will connect all systems together with cables from Phoenix Contact. In the coming weeks, all the systems will be dry tested before testing the boat in water.

Vehicle Dynamics

For the Vehicle Dynamics department, the month March is all about producing hydrofoils. The foils are made of carbon fibre and a stainless steel made insert. The carbon fibre is laminated layer by layer into MDF moulds. When all the layers are on, the mould + carbon is put into a big oven which hardens the resin and thus cures the foil.

Next to building the foils, a lot of work on other subsystems was done by the Vehicle Dynamics department. The rear strut is finished as well as all the parts for the foil actuation system. To help ease the production of those parts, Dormer Pramet provided milling and lathing tools.

Furthermore, the cooling system has been assembled completely outside of the boat to see if nothing was missing. After that, the cooling parts, like the pump from Xylem and the heat exchanger from Bowman, were assembled in the boat. For the Vehicle Dynamics department, only a lot of smaller parts are left for production and assembly now. They will proceed with these smaller parts after they finish the hydrofoils which will be at the end of March.

Dry Testing

Now that the boat is almost fully assembled, it is time to dry test the boat. In the coming weeks we will dry test all the different systems in the boat to make sure they work as expected. Some systems have already been tested outside the boat but we also need to test the integration of all the systems. After all the dry testing we can prepare the boat and the testing location for the wet testing; testing with the boat in the water. The team is really excited that we will dry test the different systems in our boat in the coming weeks and we are all looking forward to the wet testing in one month from now.

Another exciting moment is coming up; wrapping the hull. The bottom side of the hull is already wrapped but for the top of the hull we needed to laminate the deck first. Now that the deck is laminated the wrap will be put on the hull by Omber Reclame. Curious about the design of the wrap? The wrap will be revealed at our Boat Reveal in May!

Newsletter

For the coming weeks we will be working on the assembly of the last parts we need for the boat and we will dry test different systems in the boat. The next newsletter will be out in a month! Do you know someone who is not yet receiving this newsletter but would like to? Send an email to exposure@hydromotionteam.nl or click on the link below. Via the link, you can enter an email address and will be asked to confirm via Mailchimp’s email. Feel free to send any comments or questions to exposure@hydromotionteam.nl

See you next month!