Racing gets a charge
There’s a number of electrically powered features aboard boats like the Volvo 70's
Racing boats like the Volvo 70s often have electrically powered features onboard, such as canting keels, and these have to be adjusted with every tack, says Stevie Knight.
If the boat is sailing in a shifty breeze and throwing in lots of tacks it follows there's going to be a direct impact on the battery, so having enough power is a necessity - but power comes with other issues.
The more established batteries including flooded lead acid, gel and AGM versions are actually much heavier that the latest generation Lithium-ion units, which have a much smaller footprint than the others.
However, the real beauty of these batteries, says Nick Holland of Mastervolt, is the fact they can be recharged very quickly indeed. Whereas the older batteries can take as long as six or more hours to cook, because they are physically unable to absorb a full charge in a short period, the lithium-ion units are back up to speed in as little as an hour.
This means there's really not too much stopping the crew from deploying the canting keels or, for that matter, any other kind electrical motor-driven kit, as and when they want to, without having to keep running the generator to recharge the batteries. This, in turn, means the crew doesn't have to carry the same amount of diesel, which results in a lighter load onboard, explains Mr Holland.
Further, Lithium-ion batteries are able to run almost all the way down: they don't lose efficiency – and solid matter – from simply dropping below the halfway mark, as it the case with the other kinds of battery.
Deep pockets
But they are at present expensive. Mr Holland admits: “You need deep pockets to afford them, or have the backing to be trying to win races at all costs.”
Having said that, the price of Lithium-ion batteries has dropped by around 20% in the last year and Mr Holland’s prediction is they will continue to get progressively cheaper until they have reached right down into the middle of the mainstream market. Further, if you make the upfront investment, Mr Holland reckons it works out to give overall better value when put against overall lifetime costs.
However, Lithium-ion batteries do come with a few issues attached. To start with, the inward charge needs to be regulated very carefully indeed, so much so that the best way forward, according to Mr Holland, is to hitch these batteries up to something like a CAN-bus system - after all, in for a penny, in for some thousands of pounds.
This approach means plugging the batteries into a system like the Mastervolt MasterBus via a software link as well as the main DC charge. If you had the money to waste on a battery by sawing the top off, you'd see a little set of controls that sense and regulate the charge into each separate cell as well as feeding this information back into the main system.
Here the charge information is made available to the other "intelligent" components as well as to the boat’s user, who can see the battery state on a display screen.
So, you need an underlying data management system and this, of course, is part and parcel of a wholly different way of wiring up a boat. This technology results in a single wire that runs around the craft, taking both power and data with it. There’s simply no need for those massive looms of wiring that used to accompany most installations.
Recent integration
There's another side to this technology, which has come about from the recent integration of on board web based connectivity and ongoing research into intelligent systems.
Since Mastervolt has a team of people who simply sit down and work on software technology upgrades, there's always a few more tweaks being cooked up in the back room that will get the best out of the equipment.
“It used to be that if there was a failure, you'd take the whole thing out and send it back to the manufacturers or the fitters to see if they could sort it out,” says Mr Holland. “What we do now is connect with the boat's system via the web, and find out if there are any issues. Software upgrades are sent through the interface. This ensures maximum performance is always just a "dial-in" away.
He goes on to say, most of the time any failures really do get taken care of by the latest software patch. If not, the system tells you exactly what and where a component has failed, cutting down on time, money and unscheduled stops.
However, John Monks of Taplin says that there’s very good reason to be thinking carefully about exactly what you do, and don’t want, on a system like this.
“There may well be a good reason for knitting the navigation software and the power status reports together in one place,” he says, “but if you’ve got a powered windlass, you’ve probably got a very good, tailored remote control built into to it. There may be little reason, at the end of the day, to put that onto a centralised system.”
Further, he points out that weight tends not to be an issue if you account for it in the ballast. “People like to have the latest thing, but it’s not always the most suitable,” Mr Monks says. “You don’t have to buy every sweet in the shop.”
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