by: Leo de Vries
22-12-05
The Netherlands

Index

This approach has been published first at the International HISWA Symposium on Yacht Design and Yacht Construction 2004. You should all thank Prof. Richard Birmingham from New Castle University who stimulated me to write this article.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Hull design approach
• 3 Results
• 4 Discussion & References

1 Introduction 
Six metres of experiment length, with a need for human powered speed.

Human Powered boats in Europe are mostly called "waterbikes". Teams from different countries build them in order to meet every year and compete with one another during waterbike championships to see who is the best. Because of the limited size of these vessels there is a tremendous advantage of being able to afford experimental design variations at high risk. This is what makes waterbikes interesting to learn from. Not only from a biking point of view but especially from a shipbuilders point of view.

Designing for a waterbike championship means that the performance of the boat and its human power supply are optimal. The main objective is: Hull design for maximum cruising speed and a high top speed. The different conceptual design solutions involved reflect diversity in operational performance, resulting into sub-optimal design solutions in order to meet the main objective.

It was discovered that little is available in literature involving waterbikes. This article describes a hull design approach by showing the influences of four different hull design solutions. Moreover, the influences upon the main objective, sailing speed, are being discussed. After the hull design solutions, results are being evaluated by comparison of high speed and long distance speed performances, followed by a discussion.

Generalised standard commercial waterbike
In general, when waterbikes are being mentioned, it involves commercial waterbikes with a limited sailing performance and ergonomics for the cyclists. Mostly, one aspect of commercial waterbikes is very good. It is its robustness. Is design for robustness contradictive to design for a good performance? The answer should be no, if challenging its design freedom. However, two boundary conditions are decisive: protection of the propulsion unit and a good stability against list. These two conditions are well met when a catamaran configuration with a pedal wheel propulsion system is chosen. Figure 1.1 shows an example of such a design.

Figure 1.1 Illustrative example of a generalised standard commercial waterbike 

Some designs are quite similar to the generalised standard commercial waterbikes. The differences in main dimensions and details have a huge impact in the overall performance. Figure 1.2 shows an example of such a similar concept.

Figure 1.2 "5 vor 12" from waterbike team Flensburg University, Germany

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