Voyager 2.0 - Design Principals and Construction Methods

Design and Construction Principals to be applied to Voyager 2

Hull Construction

The vessel should be intrinsically buoyant and unsinkable.
It was decided to build the hull using surfboard construction methods of glass fibre coth with epoxy resin over a closed cell foam.
The hull will be built using sheets of construction foam sandwich glued with plywood stringers. The stringers would be cut to match the appropriate offset lines from the hull design drawings. Then the foam could be carved down to match plywood stringers and sanded and then glassed.

Hull Design

The hull would designed using Freeship. This is powerful, free, hull design software. It has reasonable export capabilities extracting lines and offset information.

Rudders

Standard RC Servos will be used for the rudder (or rudders). These have a limited life, mostly constrained by the wear of the feedback potentiometer. It seems that low cost servos have a single wiper within the potentiometer whereas longer life servos use potentiometers with multiple wipers (typically 3).

One way of doubling the life of a servo is to use it half the time.

Voyager 2 will only have a single rudder, but a later version of voyager will use two rudders, operated by two servos. The steering will be performed by the leeward rudder, while the windward rudder will remain centred. 

Sail

The sail will be self trimming wing sail.

This type of sail is particularly good for low powered autonomous vessels, because it  takes very little power to operate the trim tab to set the sail.

Traditional soft sails or a traditional solid sail typically require a fairly powerful winch or machinery to control.

Keel

One of the hazards to vessels is floating weed.

It is critical that the design of the keel and rudder will shed weed, rather than catch it.

This generally involves using profile with a gentle rake on the leading edge of the keel and rudder skeg to allow the weed slide off.

This also tends to lead to a the use of a unbalanced rudder attached to the sloping rudder skeg.

Equipment Housing and Equipment Bay

The Sistema plastic containers are reasonable for use as equipment housings.

They are reasonably waterproof for short term usage, but can be sealed using a non-corrosive silicone sealer if a completely water tight compartment is required.

It was decided that Voyager 2 would have an equipment bay located aft of the keel assembly, all the way to the back of the vessel with an open transomn.