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APRIL SUM-UP

With April, Rafale is blooming. Two months left before competition and, with the beginning of spring, the team begins to achieve of its projects and go through smallest ones:

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🖌 DESIGN

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  • Achievements: The design of the hull of Rafale 4 is now finished with the general look confirmed and only few details remaining. Drying tests of flax fibers have been performed to study the effects of humidity in our workshop on the performance of the composite. The design loads for the structure analysis of the hull of Rafale 4 are now known and the positions of the elements (rigging, foils, wings) are chosen thanks to the DVPP previously developed and a balance analysis of the boat in different configurations.
     

  • Work in progress: The finite element analysis for the hull of Rafale 4 has progressed well. Some reinforcements still need to be placed but we will soon know how the composite will be made for the different parts of the hull. A project about the design of Rafale 4 foils has been launched. More to come.
     

  • Future goals: Next great step for Rafale 4 will concern the hull’s mold design and manufacturing followed by the latter’s infusion.
     

 

🛠 MANUFACTURING

 

  • Achievements: The new wings made with flax fiber and thermoplastic PMMA resin are now fully infused and sanded. It took some trials and errors and a lot of time to build them since it is really complicated to place the flax fiber on the complex geometry of the wings and to apply vacuum without making critical folds for the structure. A trolley has been built to facilitate the displacements of the boat on the competition site.
     

  • Work in progress: The finite element analysis for the hull of Rafale 4 has progressed well. Some reinforcements still need to be placed but we will soon know how the composite will be made for the different parts of the hull. A project about the design of Rafale 4 foils has been launched. More to come.
     

  • Future goals: Next great step for Rafale 4 will concern the hull’s mold design and manufacturing followed by the latter’s infusion.
     

 

💻 EMBEDDED SYSTEM

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  • Achievements: This month a printed circuit board has been designed and sent to be printed for the load sensors. This board acts as a sort of motherboard for the whole sensor’s electronics and facilitates its integration into the custom casing.
     

  • Work in progress: The load sensors still require a few code adjustments and the assembling of the previously mentioned circuit boards, and they will be fully ready. Work is still ongoing to adjust and make the database and the data viewer software more reliable as well as integrating the wind meter into the data flow.
       

  • Future goals: The long-term goals for the embedded system stay the same, in essence looking towards what the system can bring to the team for Rafale 4. As for short term goals, having a working wind meter, and splitting up the GPS module from the main hub are the more important ones, and are already in progress.
     

 

📞 COMMUNICATION​

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  • Achievements: Rafale celebrate its 10Th birthday on the 21st April. In the program, an overview video of all the work achieved during ten years from the Class-C catamarans to the foiling moth, a presentation of the club by our captain, talks with our guest and the highlight of the show: the unveiling of our new wrap with a teaser video. We would like to thank all the guests for coming and everyone who participated in this event.
    In parallel, continuous communication has been done with the March Recap and Blog Post for the competition.

  • Work in progress: This month, a lot of work concerning the preparation and logistics for the competition are in progress thanks to our sponsors. Meeting were made with Voile Sansoucy to discuss and brainstorm the creation and manufacture of custom trampolines for our new ladders. Then,  GE Hydro is helping us for the transportation of the boat to Italy. 
    The end of design and manufacturing rhymes with the writing of the technical report required for the competition and its accompanying video summary while a huge communication media preparation is happening until June.

  • Future goals: Preparing the team for technical and social networks competition will become the main task in the future weeks as well as teambuilding and formalizing all the logistics related to the trip with the help of some of our sponsors.

 

🧭 NAVIGATION

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  • Achievements and work in progress: Since R3.5 design became fixed, the rigging team gathered to discuss, imagine, and prepare the 2023 setup. Following this, some preparations and some slicing were made to be ready to install everything on the boat when the wings are finished.
     

  • Future goals: The future goal would be to install and adapt the different parts of our rigging to our new wing and to our new sail to ensure the best performance. All of that will happen in the last stages of the manufacturing phase of our project. This phase will be a great occasion to ensure knowledge transmission between beginners and experts of rigging in the team and to train the team for boat setup during SUMOTH 2023.
     

 

â™» MATERIALS & LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT (LCA)

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Since manufacturing is currently in progress, the LCA team is waiting for data incomes from the workshop to complete its analysis. Meanwhile, the analysis is being rechecked, validated, and formatted for the report.

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