Lurssen Megayacht Wind-Dampening Device Challenge

Lurssen recently worked with GrabCAD, the largest online community by, and for, mechanical design engineers on the Lurssen Megayacht Challenge to resolve an engineering problem.

Lurssen approached GrabCAD for help in designing a dampening device for manually operated hinged wind breaker doors for use on Megayachts.  The intention of windbreaker doors is to resist heavy winds from entering the interior of yachts.  Sometimes the wind is so strong that the door can be blown out of a person's hand when they open the door, smashing the lock or the deckhouse recess.  The challenge is to design hinges that make the door easy to open or close with minimum resistance to people, yet resists the force of heavy winds.

GrabCAD members explained that during the Lurssen Megayacht Challenge they began to move away from getting heavily involved in answering questions from users about the requirements and the ideal solution, as it was up to the client.  They explained that many of their most successful challenges have happened because of vigorous client-engineer interaction.

There were 67 entries for the Lurssen Megayacht Challenge and of these, five winners were chosen.  The winning designs were by Marcin Otreba, Grant Griffin, Joshua Shepherd, Patrick Hughes and Ramses Chavez!

Marcin’s winning design was a re-engineered seatbelt locking clutch system.  The idea behind the innovation was to assemble a brake system, which worked when wind is too strong and doors are starting to be blown open/shut. Marcin’s inspiration came from a seat belt system which stops the belt when it is pulled too hard.  Locking bolts are pressed by locking parts and when doors are pushed with normal force, the locking bolts stay in the grooves.  However if force is bigger than spring factor, locking bolts are pushed to the roller track and the mechanism is locked.  The brake works in two directions and can be mounted with other systems.

A GrabCAD Challenge is a design contest presented by a sponsor to the community of hundreds of thousands of GrabCAD members. The sponsor sets all the conditions of the challenge, such as total award amounts, individual award levels, subset of GrabCAD community invited to the challenge, selection of the Jury responsible for evaluation, the evaluation criteria the Jury is to apply, whether the entries are public or private, duration of the contest, follow-on engagement with winner(s) to refine ideas in preparation for manufacture, etc…

For further information visit grabcad.com