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Kayak and Canoe Design Bulletin Board
Re: I would like to design a kayak
Posted By: Nick Schade In Response To: Re: I would like to design a kayak (Marc Brune)
Date: Friday, 24 September 1999, at 10:45 a.m.
Although it is unethical to copy an existing design, it is common practice to look at what is out there and pick and choose ideas to create your own new novel idea.
You probably won't find the most powerful design tools all that useful at first. For example the first thing you will probably want to know is the displacement of your boat, ie does it float you. If the your dimensions do not differ radically from existing designs, chances are pretty good it will float. Next you will probably want to want to know something about handling. Again, it is just an evolution of existing designs, you can expect comparable performance. I don't think there is any analysis software out there that will tell you how the boat will respond to doing a spin move in a frothy hole. That is still an art. It will take artistry to create the design.
Analysis can handle drag and flow of water around the surface, but in the grand scheme of boats, white water kayaks are slow. It is probably not worth spending a lot of time to minimize the drag until you get all the other performance parameters nailed down.
Regarding strength analysis. Preparing and running the model is the easy part. Determining the load cases is difficult. Plan on overbuilding.
You will eventually want to do some performance prediciton analysis for buoyancy, centers of force, etc. This does not require much hairy calculus. A few numerical techniques such as the Trapazoid technique of Simpsons rule will serve you well.
> Thanks for your note. I hope you don't mind me trying to pick your brain
> for a few more answers.. Just to let you know where I'm at, I am a senior
> mechanical engineering student at the University of Portland (Oregon). A
> friend and I are both kayakers and we thought it would be fun to design
> and build a whitewater kayak for our senior project. So, as far as fluid
> and calculus goes, we have at least a pretty good base of working
> knowledge.> What I was wondering is how you decided upon a shape for your boat. We
> have started by looking at current boat designs to try to get a feel for
> what the state of the art is. We'd like to try to go paddle a Wavesport X,
> maybe a Necky Gliss or Bliss, a Dagger Infrared and maybe a Riot Glide (if
> we can muster up the courage to get on a river in that boat).> Are there any computer modeling programs that you could suggest for
> designing the hull and deck of a kayak? I'd be looking for a program which
> could tell me about the fluid properties of the design (drag, bouyancy,
> initial/secondary stability, ease of turning, etc.) We'll probably use
> some type of finite element modeling to analyze stresses in the body.> Also, what kind of material did you use for your boat? We are considering
> kevlar, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and possibly a thin aluminum sheet for
> the hull. What we'd really like to do though is build a tougher plastic
> boat. I was thinking that there might be some thermosets we could use that
> would eliminate needing an oven to cure the plastic. Can you give me any
> suggestions here?> Thanks again, Marc Brune
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