I have been trying to do some research on wing sails. i have found one website who make rigid wings and they claim that a wing sail puts out twice the power on certain tacks. What i want to know is when you sail by wire what exactly are you controlling? alerons? i have seen pic on a c-class cat that has a wing sail.
Would you be controlling both wing angle to the boat and some kind of flap adjustment? I am not familiar with rigid wing sails, but it looks like the battens on a cat sail do some of the same principles as the soft wing sails I found on the internet.
With claims of twice the power, I would wonder what they are comparing to. Also when not on those certain tacks, how do they compare.
instead of using drag for down wind sailing the wing just rotates so that it lifts the boat down wind. i think that the wing would dominate upwind but that would be about it. i bet it floats nicely when capsized
There are pictures of a wing sail on an A-Class cat during the 2007 Worlds at
http://www.thebeachcats.com/index.php?module=pictures&g2_itemId=36427
I don't think it proved to be a big advantage, and handling the thing is a major operation requiring a giant storage box. Pretty cool experiment though.
check out the aero skimmer on youtube. that looks like the thing to do