Altair Engineering’s HyperWorks CAE platform was used by [AB]structures of Italy to structurally design and optimise the winning yacht in the Volvo Ocean Race, Groupama 4.
The yacht, skippered by Franck Cammas, claimed victory in the Volvo Ocean Race on July 9th in Galway, Ireland, after nine months and more than 37,000 nautical miles sailed under the harshest conditions.
The company took on the structural design of three of the six yachts in the 2011-2012 edition of the race.
The [AB]structures engineers employed several HyperWorks tools in the development of the yachts: HyperMesh to create finite element models; OptiStruct for optimisation; the RADIOSS solver for linear and non-linear analysis; and HyperView to post-process the results. The Engineers used the tools extensively to design and optimise the carbon structures of the three Volvo Open 70 yachts and to help again achieve fundamental structural improvements over the older-generation yachts that competed in the 2008 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race.
