Hydrofoil solutions
Hydrofoil Flight Simulator
Try before you fly
The hydrofoil flight simulator lets us compress what used to take a season of sea trials into a single working day of testing.
We use a real-time, physics-based simulation engine that lets us design, tune, and validate your hydrofoil and high-speed watercraft. It is driven by the same control inputs and sensor feeds as the real vehicle.
Developing a new hydrofoil or high-speed craft has traditionally meant building and testing physical prototypes: a slow and expensive process. We needed a way to develop and validate boat behaviour rapidly, under all conditions. The result is our in-house Flight Simulator.
Advantages
Get in touch to simulate your fast planing or foiling boat with us.
Background
The simulated hardware can be swapped for its real counterpart with no change to the simulation itself. The architecture shown below is one configuration we use in practice; many other configurations are possible. We run the simulator with cloud-based data analytics and monitoring, and have validated its physics against real boats.
The physics underneath the simulator originate from our award-winning hydrofoil dynamics paper (2017) and has been developed fully in-house over eight years. What began as a hydrofoil dynamics model has evolved into a complete boat simulation environment covering foils, hulls, propellers, and virtual sensors, with a focus on fast, small-boat dynamics in waves. This is the regime where off-the-shelf marine simulation tools are typically weakest.
Simulator Features
Hulls
- Buoyancy forces
- Planing forces
- Wave and wind effects
Propulsion
- Propeller behaviour modeled accurately: thrust, torque, efficiency
- Wageningen B-series propellers native, other propellers and thrusters possible
- Wave and wind effects
Control
- Software-in-the-loop control system inputs with virtual sensors
- Manual user control (direct feed-forward)
- Cloud-based approach possible for parallel simulations to tune controller
- Enable haptic throttle hydrofoil control with Smart-Ship technology
Rudders and foils
- Hydrofoil and rudder control for various types and shapes
- Flaps and fully rotating foils
- Propeller wash, depth, and wave effects
World and logging
- Wind, currents, and disturbance forces
- Load Google Earth 3D scenery
- Show mission lines or target points to follow
- Replay data on GPS satellite map
Wave spectra
- Real-world measured sea wave spectra
- Idealized wave spectra
- User-defined wave spectra
Data
- Visualize hull and foil forces in real-time
- Cloud data dashboard to navigate the full test results in your browser
- Identical to our real boat data systems
Use Cases
Flying Fish builds reliable, robust, and efficient hydrofoil solutions for next-generation vessels.
For end users
- See how your new boat will fly or sail
- Discover energy and fuel consumption during mission
- Test maneuvering in narrow ports
For engineers
- Create drag-speed diagrams
- Find out propulsion efficiency
- Find the effect of different control system parameters: sensor noise, foil control speed, wave filter settings
- Configure different hull parameters and see the effect on boat behaviour
For captains and pilots
- Experience a new boat virtually
