Case Study: Emirates Team New Zealand achieves hull drag reduction and improved sail lift-to-drag with ANSYS CFX

Emirates Team New Zealand - Customer Case Study

Emirates Team New Zealand faced the challenge of extracting tiny but race‑deciding performance gains from yacht designs where physical prototyping is slow and expensive and critical air/water flows are invisible. To analyze hundreds of design variants more quickly and with greater insight, Emirates Team New Zealand turned to ANSYS and its ANSYS CFX computational fluid dynamics software.

ANSYS CFX was used to run a 6‑million‑node, multiphase model in about 24 hours on a 16‑processor server, providing detailed velocity and pressure visualization, superior turbulence modeling and wave capture. ANSYS’ solution let the team lower the ballast bulb center of gravity, increase sail lift‑to‑drag and reduce hull drag by about 1%, speeding design iterations and improving on‑water performance.

Emirates Team New Zealand

Nick Holroyd

Technical Director