AUTO-OPTIMISED 7000X

Innovative and ground-breaking, the auto-optimisation 7000x process was developed by Martin Fischer, Charles Dhainaut and Mathieu Durand.

Starting from a base design, we enter our desired performance parameters and the structural limits. The computer then first calculates an optimum shape, before feeding this new design back to itself to recalculate an even more optimised shape.

Repeated thousands of times over, this looping optimisation process is made possible thanks to a novel approach to the equations that govern fluid dynamics. Eventually, the process converges towards a hyper-optimal design, something that would have previously taken the most powerful supercomputer weeks or months to calculate (and taken a human decades).

The result: wing designs that offer incredible flight characteristics virtually at the limit of the laws of physics.

"When people tell me a wing was designed with the help of CFD, I generally roll my eyes because more often than not, CFD was used to generate a pretty picture - it’s rare that the use of CFD was truly optimising in a significant way. 

So when Martin Fischer explained his team’s innovative automatic optimisation process that deviates from commonly-used Navier-Stokes equations to achieve numbers of iteration loops orders of magnitude higher, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a little. 

Then I tried the wings on the water. And I was blown away. I spent the next two weeks riding these wings every single day, so addictive was that feeling of efficiency. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was clear to me that the process not only works, but it’s a leap. There will be a time before and after this milestone. 

To put it in context, I’ve been shaping boards since I was 14, then fins and then foils. There’s a certain glamour to the master-craftsman shaper who designs by feel with decades of experience. Ask any shaper and there will always be a scepticism towards computers. Shapers took a long time to accept CNC machines. Early machines were terrible and to shun machines was somewhat justified. As machines improved, CNC gradually replaced manual shaping and today, most shapers sit behind the computer that cuts foam, no longer mowing foam in the shaping bay.

When I flew for the first time on the MF820, that was my moment: I realised it would have taken me a few hundred years to come up with this wing shape through the manual, iterative method of a master-craftsman-shaper. The MF series is just the beginning. Just like the shaper’s transition from mowing foam by hand to using the mouse and keyboard, I’m so excited in the transition from iterating prototypes by moulding and testing, to this new era of auto-optimised wing designs by computer. "

Tiesda You // Starboard Foils founder and designer