Smart Sail

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The owners of sailing boats, whether individuals with one boat, fleet owners, racers or those who maintain boats, face two key problems with sail management namely condition monitoring and finding and identifying sails when in storage. Sails can range in value up to £100k and it is critical that the correct sails with sufficient service life are selected for the sailing yachts itinerary be it racing or cruising. Yachts can have many different sails which are frequently moved between storage and yacht and their inventory is invariably managed with hand written lists or at best with spreadsheets that are manually updated. Furthermore, data of sail usage is rarely if ever recorded and such data would be kept in an on-board written log and not held in a central accessible database. The degradation sails experience due to UV exposure and “flogging” (the damaging flapping of sails that occurs whilst tacking or gybing or if they’re incorrectly set) is never recorded and there is no known method of monitoring this. Smart Sail Systems has developed and tested an innovative new sensor fixed to the sail that records the sail “passport” and monitors and stores sail use and wear enabling users to accurately record and review the usage of sails for the first time. We propose to commercialise this technology and to develop a fully tested, validated and calibrated prototype for launch in the market