Performance materials come in many guises and not just hidden away in sports clothing or protective wear. Whilst accepting that there are books dealing with this complex subject, what follows highlights just a few aspects of modern boat building. The advent of GRP (glass reinforced plastic) in the late 1950s transformed boatbuilding from a craft to an industrial process, bringing boat ownership within reach of a new, broad and modestly well-off generation with both disposable income and leisure time. Now, with the development of new closed mould production methods, GRP boatbuilding is again undergoing major change. At the Genoa International Boat Show in October 2004, the news being trumpeted by Azimut, based near Turin, and one of Europe's half-a-dozen largest builders of recreational craft, was of its new AZ 40 flybridge power cruiser. At 40 ft this new boat is in today's terms a fairly modest affair. Production-built power cruisers these days rarely start below 30 ft and can increasingly extend beyond 100 ft in length. For Azimut the new AZ 40 is at the threshold of a range of boats that extends in 13 model steps to 116 ft. Design or style innovations apart, what makes the AZ 40 a trailblazer is the method by which she is built. First of all, she is one of the few production powerboats built so far to be designed from the outset for RTM (resin transfer moulding). Moreover, she is almost certainly the first series-built power cruiser to have a GRP hull that is made of a sandwich laminate above and below the waterline, as well as a sandwich-laminate check and superstructure. A sandwich laminate usually comprises layers of resin impregnated reinforcement material on either side of a lightweight porous core. The precise lay-up of the laminate varies according to mechanical properties demanded of the design and the price of the boat but, traditionally, it will be a combination of orthothalic, the cheapest, or isothalic polyester resin with chopped strand and/or woven glass matting either side of a core of end-grain balsa wood which is perpendicular to the laminate so that the resin can percolate through it.
Sea change in boatbuilding
Die Bedeutung von Harzinjektionsverfahren für den Bootsbau
WSA International Magazine for Performance & Sports Materials ; 10 , 6 ; 16-20
2004
5 Seiten, 5 Bilder
Article (Journal)
English
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