Evolution is great .... but

[Guest]

We all know that time and tide do not stand still and that evolution is a necessary part of life. Generally it stands well and gains advantages for us and nature - but occasionally it exacts a price that we should not or daren't pay.

Discussion has been had on subjects such as Keel's falling off, new boat materials, mixing of materials, substituting etc. It is all well a scientist or designer looking at tested strength of a material and then using it inplace of traditional .... but we see more often now the failure of some of these ....

For many years - hundreds in fact materials have been accepted and proven for certain jobs .... oak for frames, pine / cedar for planking etc. then along came wonder GRP .... I have 2 GRP boats .... both literally as strong as the day they rolled of the line 30 yrs ago. I have recently sold on my pitch pine on oak racer - which will likely grace the race circuit for a few more years to come ...

I am interested to hear from forums - what experiences have been had good and bad with new materials / items / developments - with emphasis on marine please .... Why ? I think the rest of us need to understand where we are heading and possibly what we should watch for ...

Any takers ??

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[ZuidWester]

Chewing gum

MIPS is the future.
Stands for: Material Input Per unit of Service.
There's nothing really new on the market as far as building materials is concerned. R&D should be focusing on optimising resources for the future. Steel for example is energy intensive in production and requires high maintenance in terms of paint etc. Synthetics come out better, but recycling is a problem when considering a cardle to grave analysis.
Perhaps nanotechnology will offer a way forward with carbon nanotubes, bucky balls etc. Maybe design of the future will completely change the way we move on water. Think about a huge carbon 60 ball, which roles over water!
Something to chew over.
I personally love wood as a boat material, but I'm not much of a realist when it comes to boats...

 

[snowleopard]

A lot of the mishaps occur with new materials when designers take quantum steps rather than developing progressively. The classic example is (was) Team Phillips - a huge leap from existing designs all worked out in theory with no step-by-step testing. Victorian engineers were inclined to go straight to a full size production without testing theories and they produced some pretty spectacular disasters.

On a smaller scale, lack of appreciation of all the factors when working out a theory can land you in trouble. Intuitively one would think that replacing say 5% of the glass with carbon fibre in a stressed composite component would increase its strength but it actually weakens it!

 

[ParaHandy]

in support of (victorian & other) engineers .. ! The Tay bridge disaster was (probably, correctly) blamed on the designer, Bouch, for miscalculating the wind load which could have been an arithmetic error because he, Bouch, used at the same time a wind factor 3 times greater for his proposed forth rail bridge design. His design was not accepted, not surprisingly, after the tay bridge collapsed which is still, today, the greatest civil eng bridge disaster. The winner of the forth bridge design, Baker & Fowler, demonstrated their design with two buckets suspended across an engineer's shoulder and it's still standing ...

The Forth Bridge was far and away the more innovative, daring even, of the two but simple human error brought the one down whilst good design and attention to detail kept the other up. So ... human error or miscalculation, and I agree with you, is the more likely factor to cause failure as well as, these days, being blinded by the science ....

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

I did read about someone (can't remember who - might have been the late and great Dave Ovington or one of the AC programmes) who had laid up a glass/carbon hull, complete with fibre optic threads running longtitudinally through the hull... a light source was then placed at one end, and output measured at the other... as the hull stressed, and the fibres stretched or compressed the light was affected (I guess attenuated or possibly they were measuring delay?), and consequently, a more complete model was created of high and low stress points, and where materials could be saved, or needed adding to create the exact required stiffness and/or flex characteristics.....

Not directly material related, but interesting in determining what might be the most appropriate materials and quantities of materials through the boat....

Interesting huh?

 

[DJE]

Computers of course greatly increase the scale of the possible miscalculation if not properly supervised by an experienced engineer. There was a concrete framed multi-storey car park a few years ago that had to be extensively strengthened before it could be opened. A young engineer had deisgned the whole thing on the latest software and nobody noticed that he had all the reinforcement rotated 90 degrees from its correct orientation.

 

[bbg]

IMHO the issue of keels falling off boats has nothing to do with the evolution of material, design or even boatbuilding technique/process. GRP hulls with lead or cast keels are proven design / materials, as shown by the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of boats on the water today.

If the recent reports are to be believed, the issue with keels falling off results from cutting corners and poor quality control - perhaps due to cost cutting. As I understand it, this was neither a design failure nor a material failure - but a workmanship failure. The same result could happen with any other material / design if the guy at the coal face doesn't put in the right number of keel bolts, for example.

I am probably equally as concerned as you about these events - and I think it would be great if one of the mags did an article on this to investigate what happened - but I don't think the root cause is "evolution".