Quality assurance tests underway for new AC40

The first AC40 off the production line has been transported into the Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) base, and quality assurance tests are underway.

The boat will be centre stage for the Women and Youth America’s Cups in 2024 and it represents the beginning of the vitally important on-water testing and development programme, the results of which will evolve into the team’s new AC75 that will be raced to defend the 37th America’s Cup in October 2024.

Structural tests have been completed successfully, and shore-based commissioning continues this week. This involves a complete series of hydraulic, electronic and PLC tests of sailing systems and manoeuvres of over 100 tacks and gybes inside the ETNZ base.

“It’s been a huge effort by the team at Emirates Team New Zealand, but also the team at McConaghy Boats who have presented us an immaculate looking boat and now we’ve got a pretty compressed sort of 10 to 12 days’ worth of QA (Quality Assurance) checks we’re going to carry out on the boat,” says operations and reliability manager Nick Burridge.

Structural testing of a new boat is always tense for the engineers of the team as the platform is flipped upside down and rigged up to apply the predicted load cases the AC40 will experience while racing.

“We rigged up the boat with numerous sensors just to measure strains going through the hull for the tests,” explains Mechatronics Engineer Kelly Hartzell, “and then we’ve got a bunch of load cells that we hooked up and to start pulling on things, to make sure everything’s kind of behaving the way that we expect it to.”

But as loads are increasingly applied to the inverted AC40 it is as much a listening exercise as it is of data collection.

“We all have to be really quiet, so we can listen for anything going on structurally- little tings or pings, but everyone’s put a lot of hard work in so we’re quietly confident but you have always got to be prepared for the unexpected and to be a bit nimble to what happens during the test,” says structural engineer Chris Hickey.

“The purpose here is to make sure the boat is structurally sound from a design and build point of view so that when we go sailing on the first day we can have confidence that the boat is as strong as designed, everyone will be safe and it will perform as it should.”

ETNZ is not the only team that will get assurances from the AC40 structural test and commissioning process. The results will go a long way to verify the overall design of the AC40 class fleet and its readiness to go sailing for all of the America’s Cup teams.

“The AC40 is an important boat for us and for all the teams because it’s a boat that most of our development is going to happen on,” says ETNZ principal naval architect Bobby Kleinschmit. “It’s great to be able to take all the work that we’ve done, everything that we’ve learned in designing the AC75 and put that all together into a package. It’s not just for us, it’s for the other teams and the Women and Youth AC. It’s really cool to see that expand into the greater sailing community.”

McConaghy Boats, in conjunction with ETNZ, presented the Hydrogen Chase Zero 13m recently at Cannes. Burridge recently spoke to MIN about its capabilities as an AC chase boat, and the need to balance fuel consumption with long periods at sea.

Just two weeks ago, America’s Cup team Alinghi Red Bull Racing capsized its AC75 Boat Zero after its first sail in Barcelona (31 August 2022). The team said that after a successful day of sailing, the AC75 Boat Zero was hit by a violent rain squall, which developed over the city of Barcelona.

Images of quality assurance tests underway on AC40 courtesy of ETNZ.