HIGH TECH WOOD

RUPERT HOLMES REPORTS ON LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN WOODEN CONSTRUCTION, AND WHY THIS ANCIENT MATERIAL IS BEING USED FOR HI-TECH CONTEMPORARY DESIGN

- RUPERT HOLMES

Why would a naval architect and structural engineer used to working with cutting edge materials for America's Cup teams, including INEOS Britannia, and companies like Airbus, be excited about working with wood?

"It's quite simple for me," says French designer Thomas Tison, "Modernity does not neglect where we all come from - on the contrary it makes the best of it. In a way a boat is a heritage, so to ignore wood would be to ignore the essence of yacht design and building.

"Carbon fibre is only an evolution from this heritage and reinstating wood as a modern material increases the number of options a naval architect has for creation and performance."

Tison designed the stunning, contemporary 48ft offshore racer Elida which launched last year, and currently has a timber/epoxy 40ft high-end daysailer on the drawing board. To optimise Elida's weight and stiffness Tison tested three different timber and glue laminates at an Airbus facility. "What we found was very interesting," he told me.

"The existing data was 20 years old, but now we can carefully select the glue and timber, so the figures for our laminates were stiffer than predicted, with the sitka spruce an order of magnitude better than expected."

Elida is built of diagonally planked sitka spruce covered with a 3mm mahogany veneer. Additional internal stiffening is provided by local layers of 200g carbon fibre. The result is a very stiff structure projected forestay loads match those used on TP52s, yet the total weight of the 48ft hull shell is only 1,000kg.