After eight strong strokes, RISE’s rowing boat rose out of the water on its hydrofoils. Four strokes later it collapsed back into the choppy water of the Schie.
That event, a world’s first for a four-man rowing boat, took place in Delft on Saturday, August 15. It was just ten days prior to the planned demonstration on the Willem Alexander Baan near Rotterdam. Three days after the crash, Delta visited the student team RISE (Rowing Innovation and Sports Engineering) to see what went wrong.
The broken front hydrofoil – black, slick and two meters wide – has been taken off the boat and put on a bench nearby. It has the shape of a reversed T and it has a nasty crack on the inside of where the wing is attached to the vertical strut. The team no awaits a visit of the manufacturer QConcepts to find out more.
“At the moment we won’t speculate on how it broke”, says Jaep Koning, a student at Aerospace Engineering and chief hydrofoil with the RISE Team. Choppy water, faulty design or inadequate manufacturing – anything might have caused the fracture. But until he can do a full analysis of the fracture with the manufacturer, Koning is determined to remain unbiased.
The team has been working on the hydrofoil boat since November 2013. Initially, their plan to have a rowing boat lift out of the water on the power of the rowers met with scepticism. Many believed the boat couldn’t get itself out of the water or that it would be so hard to row that it would soon fall back again.
According to the impression of the rowers, the boat accelerated once out of the water, and its stability increased when it was lifted on the 2-meter wide front hydrofoil. On two previous attempts, the boat lifted out of the water as well. The duration was short because the lift made it hard for the rowers to complete their stroke.
Similar attempts on human powered hydrofoil include the Norwegian flying kayak or Flyak (2005) and the flying single sculls from Harvard (2009).
RISE was the first to get a four-man rowing boat on its wings, brief as it was. The wing may be broken, but not so the team spirit. “Remember the Wright Brothers also started (motorised flight) with a short jump”, said Koning.
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