Posted by We know the team at Cape Horn Engineering, but they’re just too smart for us.
We are delighted to assist Drift Energy with its exciting and innovative renewable energy project. High-performance solid wing sailing vessels cruise around the world’s trade winds, harvesting green energy from underwater turbines. (Sustainability award winner 2025).
The design and development of DRIFT’s first energy harvesting ship uses the latest Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) technology from Cape Horn Engineering to ensure the vessel extracts the maximum possible energy from the power of the wind. Using these highly accurate models, we can predict vessel performance and make informed design decisions to enable optimal clean energy.
The Wind Power Generation Ship Programme integrates rigid sail wings for wind propulsion with underwater turbines, mounted to the hull of a 60m catamaran to harvest power. The vessel will be routed with AI to stay in the best wind conditions and use the electricity it produces to run an onboard electrolyser that generates and stores green hydrogen at sea.
To date, we’ve run over 500 CFD simulations, starting with the ship’s hydrodynamics and analysing the bare hull across key operating conditions to assess hull resistance. We also assessed the underwater turbine cases to compare geometries and turbine characteristics. For the ship’s aerodynamics, we analysed and assessed two rig options, testing single and multi-wing configurations in various operating conditions and control angles.
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