Technology Day 1993 - "Riding the Wave of Innovation: Ocean Recreation and Sports"

[MUSIC PLAYING]

VANDIVER: My name's Kim Vandiver. I'm a professor in the Ocean Engineering Department and chairman of the MIT faculty for a few more days anyway. I'm standing in for Louis Cabot as the moderator of this afternoon's Technology Day panel on Ocean Recreation and Sports. There we go. Did you all hear that, I hope?

[INAUDIBLE].

Testing. Okay, we're back on it. I won't repeat it all. My name's Kim Vandiver. I'll be the moderator this afternoon.

Our four guests are Professor Jerry Milgram from the Ocean Engineering Department; Ted Van Dusen, who owns his own company and is going to talk to you about his exploits, among other things, in making racing shells; Don Liu from American Bureau of Shipping; and Peter Quigley, who I saw in the Building 7 lobby a mast and sail from a sailboard with carbon fiber components from Fiberspar, Peter's company. All five of us are graduates of one degree or another of the Ocean Engineering Department.

And I'm not one of these people who gives lengthy introductions. And since I know roughly what each of the speakers are going to talk about today, I think I'm going to let them speak for themselves as to the kind of things that they do and are interested in. We're going to follow what the order in the program, which is Professor Milgram and then Peter, Ted, and Don following.

The format that I'd like to use this afternoon is each one has a presentation of 15 minutes or so that they would make. And if you have a-- I'll entertain a couple of questions after each presentation if you have something specific you'd really like to address to them right then. And at the end of the fourth presentation, the last presentation, we'll open it up to a more general audience participation discussion and you can ask questions of any of the speakers. So with that, Jerry, if you'd like to start, please.

MILGRAM: Well, from this morning's session, you can tell that what we did at America3 was a different approach to making fast sailboats. So that's a kind of ocean engineering which I'm going to describe here, this different approach. And Kim's volunteered to put it on the viewgraphs for me, so we'll just start.

What I show you here is a flow chart of how one traditionally designs a sailing boat in this day and age. There is very little science in it. There's some experience, and if you start with a fast design, and you need to change to a new design and can modify your fast design, you've got a chance of doing something that's fast, maybe.

You've all seen the difficulties of this approach. Some designer will come out with a bunch of fast boats, and four years later he'll be an also ran. And that's because he's stuck with this. He can't expand.

So this is how it's normally done. And we didn't do that. Kim, you're going to have to pretty much stay pretty quick. We're going to go through them pretty quick.

We concluded in America3 that was not a good approach. Because what I show you here as a function of wind speed is the difference in time it takes to sail around the course, both for the windward legs and for the entire course, when you change the resistance of the boat by 1%. And so it's a huge effect.

So in 10 knots of breeze, if you've got 1% more resistance, you've lost the race by 33 seconds. So you've got to do better than messing around, which is what the traditional yacht designer does.

[LAUGHTER]

The late Van Clark used to call those people "God damn boat drawers." And those of you who know Van will appreciate the comment, or who knew him.

The approach we took in America3 I've got on the next viewgraph. And this is a flow chart of what we did. And the items that have orange inside the boxes are ones where there's lots of science.

And there's two big design tasks, or three design tasks. And the flow goes both way to those, because the science has to feed back to the designs in order to come up with something that's very fast. You'll see at the centerpiece of this technical approach are our velocity prediction programs.

They're the key, because they allow us, before you build a boat, to evaluate how fast they're going to be. And just very briefly going through this, you'll see you have to do some-- you might call this preliminary design. If any of you are big ship naval architects, then you know something about the way you can design some hulls, you tank test them.

You've got to somehow get sail forces. You've got to somehow design good sails. You've got to include the added resistance due to sea waves. And eventually, you get down to design selection, some testing.

There's some feedback loops here that aren't shown. And eventually you get to what you want, if you do it right. Okay, can we have the next one?

This velocity prediction program, which is the-- just loss something-- which is the centerpiece of the thing, can be viewed as a computer-based balance between hydrodynamic forces and aerodynamic forces. And the computer will change the variables that affect the performance of the boat, or that measure the performance of this boat-- the speed, the heel angle, and the leeway angle-- until these come into balance. And that's where you're sailing.

So this isn't for dynamics. This is for steady state sailing. And it's simply a computer program. And the actual computational part's pretty simple. The hard part are how you model the various forces that have to go into the model.

The next viewgraph's a block diagram of one of these velocity prediction programs, which is there to emphasize it, emphasize what a small part of the whole thing the actual solving of the equations of motion are. The hard part are making the models. Making these models which determine the forces that affect the speed.

And we're trying to get to a point where we can use technology for evaluating potential designs with resistance differences of something less than 1%. This is a bigger version of one of the viewgraphs Bill Koch showed this morning. What we did in our work is we decomposed the resistance of the hull into various components.

Now, I need to explain to you that if you could test full size boats, you wouldn't need to do this. If you had a full sized boat, you test it, it has a certain resistance. But you can't test full size boats.

You can test models, or you can make approximation to portions of the resistance computationally. Each of them scale differently. Or each of them has a different kind of error. And as a result, the decomposition into these various components is useful.

This is skin friction of the hull. This is the wave making resistance of the hull and skin friction on the appendages. The drag due to the fact that the boat heels and makes a side force to balance a side force of the sails. And the resistance due to the sea waves.

Now, how big are each of those components? The next two viewgraphs will show you them. For sailing to windward, what I show here is the fraction of the total resistance that each of these components makes up. Now Kim, if you could put on the next one and then do an overlay of the two. There's two missing here. There's the two that are missing-- the resistance due to heel and side force, and the added resistance.

Now if we can do an overlay-- and let him struggle with it. There we are. You will notice that a typical windward sailing speeds for these boats, 9 and 1/2 knots or so, all the components except skin friction have the same order of magnitude. And skin friction is bigger.

And they're all-- all these are around 15% or so. And this is around 40%. And I ask you to bear that in mind, that each component of resistance in the conditions you care about the most are about 15% of the total resistance. And the job that one has to do for potential designs is to evaluate each of those components and see how it affects speed. What the VPP does for you is it will tell you the speed if you know how big each one of these components and the sail forces are.

There's been a lot of work done on computational hydrodynamics for residuary resistance. And the people who do it pride themselves on how good they are. They say, look, I got it right within 10%. Well, 15% of 10%-- 15% of the resistance, 10% error is 1.5%. That's a minute around the course.

Forget it. It's not good enough. Those people are focused on their computations and not on the job of winning a boat race. And that's got to be realized.

And we realize that. And we realized we had to go to the towing tank. I've got three quick slides, if we can see them. If you can shut that off here. And if we're lucky, maybe we have three quick slides. Does this work? Well, I guess we're not going to see them.

PRESENTER: [INAUDIBLE]

MILGRAM: Where's the man? We got him up.

[LAUGHTER]

There are no slides. Okay. Here you go. We have them in viewgraph. They're just not as good on viewgraph. Forget the slides.

They go in-- here we go. I'd like you to show that one first. You'll have to fuss around. That one second, and that one third. That's third. There we are.

That's a viewgraph of what goes on at a towing tank. And there's a couple of things to see here that are important technologically. By the way, I think this guy's in the audience here.

The models are big. Scale error in tank testing is a big problem. If you don't make big models, typically bigger than 20 feet or so, you're not going to get the resistance measured to less than a percent, to accuracies of at least a percent. The models have to be big.

All of you-- some of you are interested in sailboats, and you all know about tank fiascos. The business is loaded with stories of them. You'll see there are a lot of models. We tested about 40 models.

We did 99 sets of tank tests. Each test was 105 runs. Those 105 runs count, back and forth in the tank, for 99 sets of tests, because we did retests and different appendages. Was 1,500 miles in the tank, which is about as far as all our big, full scale boats sailed. So we went about as far in real distance at model scale as we did full scale.

So this this shows you some of the instrumentation on the deck of the model. You have to do this tank testing right. There's a whole bunch of load cells in here and what have you. This is a heeled model, as you can see it. It's a very intensive process. And it's a process where if you want to play this game, it behooves you to do it right.

Now I have a picture of a boat coming down the tank. Is that upside down? Yeah, here we go. There's the boat coming down the tank--

[LAUGHTER]

--in the towing tank. And if you do that right, you can get the residuary resistance right. And you can get the best estimate of friction or resistances that you're going to get. It's not perfect, but it's as good as you're going to do.

What about the other components of resistance? I mentioned before resistance due to appendages. And that's one thing where computational hydrodynamics can help you a lot.

Here's a view of a keel fin and a bulb. These boats are bulb keelers. And these aspects of that fin and bulb are things that you can evaluate with computational fluid mechanics and look at their results in your velocity prediction program to evaluate how fast your boat's going to go. The next viewgraph gives an example of fiddling with the taper ratio, the width of the keel fin at the top to the width at the bottom.

And you find that-- this is a measure of drag. It's written, it's kind of long-- versus taper ratio. And you can see that you can gain about a percent and a half in keel fin drag. Yeah, about a percent, say, 2%, 15% of 2%, 1/7th of a percent. About eight seconds.

So if you change the taper ratio from this much to this much-- here, this is the keel fin. It's almost straight up and down. And this one's much smaller at the bottom than at the top. If you do that, you can gain eight seconds. Well, that doesn't sound like much, but if you work at these things for a couple of years and gain that eight seconds 10 times, you're a winner.

So that you can do computationally. But computation won't do the whole job for appendages. You've got to do wind tunnel testing. And I show you a picture of an inferior wind tunnel test.

That's upside down, because the way that most of the wind tunnel tests are done is you mount the body in the floor of the wind tunnel. Here's the keel fin, here's the bulb. Here's some winglets. Here's some apparatus to measure the flow.

Why do I say that's inferior? This was done by the Partnership for America's Cup Technologies, who's got some scientists that didn't come to MIT working for them.

[LAUGHTER]

And they did these tests. Now, on the next viewgraph I have just a sketch of how you do it right. And I'll explain to you why there's a difference. Turn it over.

This model has a hull on the wind tunnel floor, and it has a rudder. And the reason that you need this is the flow up here is influenced by the curvature of the hull. And you're going to get the winglet angle wrong for sure if you don't put the hull there. Guaranteed. In fact, we experimented. We know you do.

Also, when you change the lift on the keel fin, the trailing vorticity affects the rudder. So you've gotta do it all. You've got to put the important stuff in. Now, this doesn't have everything. This doesn't have waves, because wind tunnels don't have waves.

So that isn't there. But within the restrictions that you have, you've got to do everything you can to get as far as you can. To get as far as you can.

So what I've given you now is a brief vignette of how we get the various hull forces that go into the velocity prediction program. What about the other half? What about the sail forces?

And this is a viewgraph of our measured speed made good to windward that we actually measured with one of our boats. And the dotted line was when we did this, the predicted speed. And that turns out not to be good enough.

In other words, you cannot evaluate one design from another if you have these kinds of errors in your speed predictions. In particular, the prediction completely fails to capture the phenomenon of when the wind gets below a certain level, the speed suddenly drops. We call that falling off the cliff.

And depending on the design of your boat, you can move this around. You can move this down here, but then this is going to drop down. You've got to do some tradeoffs.

So we looked into why we had those problems. And what we did is we built the sailing dynamometer, or we refurbished one that we had-- and this you saw from Bill this morning-- in order to get the sail forces better. Can we take a look at this? That's a photograph of this sailing dynamometer.

It looks like a sailboat on the outside, but inside it's really very different. And it has this frame. You can skip the next viewgraph, the one you had on, because everybody's seen it this morning. And we'll go to the one after that.

It's built with an internal frame where all the sail forces are resolved. That's the one. Everything that's red here is hooked to the rig. Everything that's black is hooked to the boat, including the people inside. And that means that if a person touches something red, this thing's going to get the wrong readings, because the load cells that connect the red stuff to the hull are computer interfaced within the boat.

You can measure forces on sails and you can develop a mathematical model for sail forces with a device like this, which was a scale model of an America's Cup rig sailed in waves. And we tried to find the best approximation we could to scaled waves. And we sailed in somewhat protected waters. And we developed a sail model for our velocity prediction program.

And what I have next is the comparison between measurement and prediction after they got the sail model right. Now, so now we had a way where if we tank tested a boat, and if we designed some sails, we had a way of evaluating how fast it was going to go. And with that, one could progress towards design.

And remember early on I indicated that there's feedback between the science and the design process. And the next viewgraph more or less is a flow chart showing the kind of design process that we did. Once we got to the point where we knew we could predict speed if we had tank tests, we designed a group of models with systematic parametric variations. No shots in the dark. Each one was a systematic variation from the next one.

We tested it. We analyzed its data. We learned the best parameters for San Diego. About that time was the World Championship racing before the America's Cup. We learned a lot, because the technology couldn't tell us all, particularly about some aspects of the added resistance due to sea waves.

And one of our designers-- we had a 10-person design team, and one of the designers was very good at recognizing the boats that did best in waves and why. And that was very important. That got dialed in.

We designed a second set of models, tank tested those, analyzed the results, and figured out what is it that makes fast boats, you see. This was the feedback. And that allowed us to design their final boats. And they were very fast.

Finally, last viewgraph, if you'll remember this morning, Bill Koch told you that just before America3 sailed in the America's Cup, we changed appendages. And we knew the appendages that we had were not optimum. However, we learned enough with our velocity prediction programs to use them to predict speeds for appendages that we never tested.

And we knew we needed better performance in light wind and we could sacrifice some performance in heavy wind. So we designed these new appendages, we built them, and changed the appendages before the America's Cup with complete confidence that these new appendages were going to work. And they did.

And they did exactly what our predictions were. What you saw this morning from Bill's talk was the actual measurements of speed differentials. And these were the predictions.

We predicted that with the new appendages in a 7-knot breeze, we'd gain about a minute around the course. In an 18-knot breeze, we'd lose 1/10th of a minute. And that was very, very close to what we actually observed. So we were able, by using good engineering skills and some decent computer programming, to develop predictive tools that could be effective in the real world situation. We'll leave it at that and listen to the next guy.

[APPLAUSE]

We can entertain a question or two now, and then remember later on, we'll have a more open format after everyone's finished.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] hypothetically modifying what might be a [INAUDIBLE] boundary layer [INAUDIBLE] but if you warm the hull or you put warm water at the bow [INAUDIBLE] along or put something ecologically acceptable [INAUDIBLE] it's not going to change the boundary layer [INAUDIBLE] decrease hull resistance.

MILGRAM: Absolutely. The problem is you can't do it.

AUDIENCE: I don't mean for a contest with strict rules.

MILGRAM: No, I understand. Well, in our case with rules, we were not permitted to use certain additives. We looked into potential uses of shapes that would encourage laminar flow. And this was one of our studies. I mean, I didn't have time to tell you everything.

And we found that it would be rather ineffective in seawater, because microscopic bubbles and particulates were enough triggers for turbulence that if you were operating above the critical Reynolds number, no matter what you did it was going to become turbulent. You could make it laminar in your test tank that didn't have the particulates, but you couldn't at sea. And for that reason, we did not go to laminar flow sections.

AUDIENCE: It would reduce [INAUDIBLE] viscosity [INAUDIBLE].

MILGRAM: Sure, yeah. As you said, if you could heat the boat, I mean, but that would do something. I don't think that would be permitted under this rule, but perhaps under some other.

AUDIENCE: It's a two-part question. I understand the defense of the Cup will be in '95. Where's it going to be, and do you think they're going to be making changes to the boat?

MILGRAM: It's going to be in San Diego, and the changes will be incremental. Because enough of what our boats looked like has now gotten around, plus two, three of our designers jumped ship and went to work for the foreigners.

[AUDIENCE BOOS]

MILGRAM: But they all came from the West Coast.

[LAUGHTER]

And so between what they know very well and what other people can tell by looking, I think there will be only incremental changes.

AUDIENCE: Are the sails still proprietary or is that something that's being marketed?

MILGRAM: Oh, the sail fabric? We'll have to talk about that later. I think there's probably some people in the audience who know that better than I do.

VANDIVER: Jerry, are the two-- the two existing boats, will they be competitive in '95 in your opinion?

MILGRAM: Well, one of them could be. One of the boats-- Ken's is a very big boat. It was built in case the wind was much stronger than anticipated. But America3 would be either competitive or very close to competitive. I can design a much faster boat right now. The other guys are likely to come up with something that's faster too, so I would say competitive but not a winner.

One last question, the lady out here.

AUDIENCE: I was just curious. You said some of your designers jumped ship to the foreigners. I thought designs had to be by a [INAUDIBLE].

MILGRAM: Or a resident who's been in the country for a minimum time of two years prior to the start of the first race.

[LAUGHTER]

That was May the 4th.

VANDIVER: May the 4th, all right. I think we'll move on to our next speaker, Peter Quigley. And we'll follow the same format, a couple of questions after he finishes. But there'll be plenty of time at the end for lots more questions.

QUIGLEY: Jerry, can I borrow your microphone? I think I'll just stand out there and [INAUDIBLE].

VANDIVER: OK, good. There is a pointer if you want it.

QUIGLEY: People will have to bear with me a bit. I'm coming down with a bit of a cold, so if I doze off in the middle of my talk. You'll definitely have reason to doze off yourself.

What I'd like to describe, I graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Ocean Engineering Department in 1985. I was the recipient of a very wonderful academic prize called the Robert Bruce Wallace Prize that I received in '85 that paid for a full year of graduate study here at the Institute. So I think the one distinction that I bring to this panel is I think I'm the only dropout from MIT on the panel.

Because the one year of graduate study that I undertook here at MIT really was what really fostered the launch of a company which initially had a start in a very narrow application of wind surfing. Which many of you have seen if you spend time on the water or near the water. All of us have seen wind surfers.

But what was interesting from our perspective is that there was an emerging type of material which I felt had much broader application. And I began to become exposed to those materials while an undergraduate and a graduate student here. So what I'm going to do is describe a recreational sporting goods application that's marine-based, but I'm also going to reflect a little bit on the potential bridge from that sporting goods application to other applications in both industrial and commercial markets. And in many ways, a lot of the technology associated with the America's Cup ultimately can find its way into more diverse applications than simply winning a boat race.

So I'm going to reflect a little bit on a very narrow application of windsurfing, but also reflect on how that might be applied in a broader sense to emerging industrial and commercial applications. So I'm going to start really just with a bit of background about what actually I became interested in. And I'm not going to read through this here, but what I want to describe is a type of material which many of you have been exposed to, but others really are still somewhat not exposed to.

And the general class of material is referred to a composite material. And what a composite is, we're sitting in a room that's steel reinforced concrete, where you have very brittle and weak concrete reinforced by steel members which are very high strength. Composites have been around a long time. Reinforced straw brick is an example where the brick was very brittle. Going back to prehistoric times, people found if you added straw to the brick, you made a structural element which had a great deal higher mechanical properties.

So what a composite material is, there's been a lot of innovation. All of us have been exposed to fiberglass, really, for 40 or 50 years in terms of recreational boats. Fiberglass is the dominant material these days in both motor boats and recreational sailing boats. And that's a form of composite material-- glass fiber reinforcing a polymer material.

But where are these materials being used? Because each of us in this room probably, whether we recognize it or not, has probably been exposed to composite materials. Where these materials are most used is in the aerospace industry applications. The B2 Stealth Bomber that has all kinds of complex radar evading capabilities and has extreme light weight.

The next area where people have seen these the most is in sporting goods. And there isn't anyone in this room who has played tennis in the last five years that can find a tennis racket that's not made out of composite materials. I know, Jerry, what was the structural weight in the America's Cup in terms of how much of the structural weight was composite material?

MILGRAM: About 90%.

QUIGLEY: Okay, so that there's another good example. The America's Cup boats, in fact, the sails, the spars, the hulls, some of the appendages were made of composite materials. Golfers in the audience know that graphite and carbon fiber is becoming much more prevalent in the use of golf shafts, as well as the heads of the clubs as well.

So in the first two applications, that makes up about 95% of where composite materials are used. But they're beginning to show up more and more in other applications. People that rap on the fender of a car will notice it doesn't quite sound like metal anymore. Many applications in cars are using plastics or reinforced plastics.

So just to reference what I perceive as an opportunity really going back 10 years now was if you look at this bottom pie chart-- it's probably difficult to see in the back of the room. The chart on the left projects what the potential growth of the use of these materials are from a congressional office study back in 1989. And if you're thinking about starting an enterprise, it's always nice to see a potential growth curve that's one of these. It's not quite biotechnology, but it has the potential to be an industry which offers relatively rapid growth.

If you look at that top section-- is it focused in the back, or is it kind of? Let's see what we can do here.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

QUIGLEY: There we go. If you look at that top pie chart, 80% of the circle is made up of aerospace, and about 15% is made up of sporting goods. What those two industries have in common is price is no object. If you're a golfer--

[LAUGHTER]

If you can hit the ball 10 yards further and it's going to stay within the short grass, really, the price that you're going to pay is really not conditional on does it cost $50 more for a set of clubs. I won't even refer to the costs involved with the America's Cup, because all of us have read the stories and heard about it. I think in the sporting goods world, it's the closest thing that we could ever come to in the $700 hammer category. And the technology was heavily applied with the ultimate objective of winning a sailboat race. So there's another example that price wasn't really an object if you can make the sailboat go faster.

But my contention was, and really an observation was, that these materials had the potential to be used in broader applications than just sporting goods and aerospace. So where does that lead us? As a graduate student, 23 years old, I decided that where an opportunity lie was in windsurfing.

And another thing which I found relatively unique about my own experience is I think I'm the only one who ever attended MIT for the following two reasons. First was it had a sailing team. And this is in order of priority. Second, I could study naval architecture. And at age 14, I decided that the design of boats, if what I really was was a professional sailor at age 14, the design of boats was probably the next best thing.

So really, when I was a student at MIT, that's really what my focus was. I sailed on the intercollegiate team. I did an Olympic campaign in 1984 in the Finn class. And really, that's what really made me tick. I was highly focused on sailing.

To refer windsurfing to sailing in many ways is like referring skiing to snowboarding. They're almost two different sports entirely. The people that sail oftentimes don't have anything to do with windsurfing. It's sort of like windsurfing is kids, and people that sail sit down when they sail, and they have cocktails, and they go on the New York Yacht Club cruise, and those kind of things.

Windsurfing is really rock music, and kids, and it's high energy, and it's jumping and sailing 40 or 50 miles an hour. But what the opportunity was for the use of a composite material in a windsurfer. And this is a section of a windsurfer mast. And I'll just pass it around the audience to give people a feel.

The thing that's most noticeable about it is that it's extremely light. It's about half of the weight of aluminum. And it's significantly stronger. And that's why, in a case like the America's Cup boats, where there was really a high premium on reducing weight to improve performance, there was a willingness for people to use alternative materials.

So I'll circulate this. Our company this year will produce more than a million linear feet of this tubing. And what that has led us to be able to develop is some very innovative manufacturing technologies which have the potential to use these types of structural materials in other applications. So I'm going to interrupt this discussion with a five minute infomercial here to give you an idea exactly of how this very lightweight and high strength material is actually used in a windsurfing application.

So Ralph, we'll start with you. We can pass that around. So what I'm going to put on here, this is a video that is kind of really a balance between a marketing video, but also it really illustrates the technology involved with combining fibers of different types with a polymer or plastic material. And the resulting material results very improved properties when compared to conventional materials, such as aluminum. So I don't know if we need to turn the lights down, but let's give this a try.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Fiberspar masts-- the lightest, strongest, and most durable carbon fiber windsurfing masts in the world. No other mast available today demonstrates the same strength at such light weight. In comparison tests designed to measure how far a mast can bend before it breaks, the competition's masts don't measure up.

In test after test, Fiberspar masts consistently demonstrate the ability to bend twice as far as their competitors. Peter Quigley began working with composite materials at MIT in 1980, and developed the patented laminate that gives Fiberspar the unique properties of lightness, strength, and bendability.

- What the bend translates directly into is durability and strength. If you can bend further than the next guy, you've got a stronger product. That's the bottom line.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- It's the combination of incredible strength and low weight that defines the Fiberspar difference. Nevin Sayre, professional World Cup racer and three time national champion, has been using Fiberspar masts and booms since 1986, and has been instrumental in their development.

- Well, on professional ranks, everyone is so good that the equipment often is making a difference. And most of the guys who are sponsored by different sponsors, they have different boards, different sails, et cetera. The one thing that is fairly constant is the fact that we all use masts made by Fiberspar.

The rigs are lighter. they're more durable. They're easier to control. People can do things on windsurfers but they never could before. It's taken the sport into a whole new realm.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- The Fiberspar difference begins with a unique and highly specialized manufacturing process. Carbon fibers are interlaced with two different fiberglass yarns to create a seamless, triaxial structure. The masts are constructed to be the light at the top with a lower center of gravity for easier handling.

The entire profile is narrowed to smooth the flow of air for superior aerodynamics. Fiberspar's specialized manufacturing process means superior reflex response. Your mast recovers quicker after a gust or pump for instant acceleration and increased speed. In fact, Fiberspar carbon masts recover four times faster than fiberglass and twice as fast as aluminum. Most importantly, Fiberspar masts are engineered to withstand just about anything.

- You can treat the equipment in a way that allows you, while you're on the water, to be as aggressive and go for it as much as you possibly can. And the equipment is not going to be the weak part. It may be your body. [LAUGHS]

- As important as the equipment is for professionals, beginners need it too. They need the lightest mast, the most durable mast, and the mast that's easiest to use.

- At Rhonda Smith's windsurfing center at the Gorge in Hood River, Oregon, Fiberspar's lighter masts make windsurfing easier and more enjoyable to learn.

- Just recently I had a woman in one of my clinics who could not get her sail out of the water. I went over to help her. I tried to get her sail out of the water. I couldn't.

I turned to her and said, you've got to get a Fiberspar mast. The water starters are benefiting the most. I mean, they can now just lift the sail up effortlessly. It's not a bench press anymore.

- Fiberspar has developed a series of tests to measure the critical performance characteristics of their masts to be sure that specifications for quality and consistency are met. Fatigue tests ensure that the mast will maintain its designed curve, stiffness, and reflex response over years of demanding use. Other tests measure the forces that a mast can withstand.

And of course, we check to see how far it can bend before it breaks. But before the Fiberspar label goes on, every mast must pass the quality assurance test. First, load cells measure the weight and center of gravity.

Next, the mast is checked for proper curve and stiffness. Finally, each mast is subjected to a strength test to ensure structural integrity. When the green lights come on, you can be assured that the mast has met all of Fiberspar's strict specifications.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mast curve and stiffness determine both performance and power. Without the right mast, your sail won't perform to its potential. To ensure optimum performance, Fiberspar engineers work closely with leading sail makers to maintain their comprehensive mast-sail compatibility guide.

- There's no mystery to matching mast to sails anymore. Fiberspar has a chart that tells everybody how to match their sail to their mast.

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State of the art engineering results in a lightweight mast that is built to last. And most importantly, quality is guaranteed. Every mast we make passes the quality assurance test.

Go faster with more control. Sail longer with less effort. Once you experience the Fiberspar difference, you'll wonder how you ever sailed without it.

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QUIGLEY: Okay. Now, I thought the reason that would be interesting to show is really something really unusual happened while I was here at MIT, in fact, and launching this venture. I became not a sailor. In other words, windsurfing was so different from the sailing experience that I had, what it really became was really a business opportunity, and also a personal challenge in terms of to try and start with an application where these materials were really not well accepted.

What was revealing about those bending tests is that carbon fiber has typically been assumed to be a very brittle material. It can be very stiff and very light, but typically, you can't fabricate structures which can be subjected to such extreme bending loads. And to really try and commercialize based on this very narrow product a company that was based on innovation and manufacturing.

So we're located an hour southeast of Boston. I'm happy to say, since 1989 when we really began production in earnest of windsurfer masts, our employment-- we now have 65 full time employees. We've been literally running about between two shifts a day and three shifts a day, six days a week since 1989.

We supplied all of the masts to the Olympic competitors in 1992. Every single competitor used masts made by Fiberspar. And the real innovation from my perspective is not just in the development of the business based on what you perceive as a very narrow niche, but also the opportunities we have to expand based on the innovation in manufacturing.

So what I have is just to illustrate a couple of points where I think that this is going and where we as an organization are trying to position ourselves to capitalize. And here's a couple of things. I've selected one particular industry, because I think people in this room, many of us here have some affinity or some affiliation with the Ocean Engineering Department here at MIT, which is celebrating, as all of us know, it's 100th anniversary.

And one of the things that I've selected, just for an illustration, is one was a symposium hosted in Washington, the National Academy of Sciences, which was looking-- there's nothing really magical about this, except just to really illustrate that these materials are moving and have the potential to move beyond these very high end sporting goods or aerospace applications. This conference was called in 1991.

And coincidentally, it was at the point where the aerospace companies were desperate to try and find new applications for composite material. So this conference was, I would say, 95% attended by aerospace engineers and executives trying to get together with people in the marine industry to see if there may be some potential. But this was looking at, because of the lightweight and high strength, corrosion resistant properties that a composite may offer, some potential applications in the marine environment.

And here's another example where for offshore structures, again, a symposium hosted at MIT-- this one much smaller-- but attending, I would say there were probably 75 attendees of all the major oil companies in the world. Each of them probably had two or three of their senior R&D people attending this, if you will, a very exploratory discussion, more or less, on what potential applications for advanced composite materials might there be in the offshore industry, where corrosion, exposure to marine environment, to really caustic chemicals, in many cases a desire to reduce weight if the structure is being supported by hydrostatic forces, et cetera.

So I guess what I'd like to just share with you today is really from the experience as a student at MIT, and initially as a sailor and an athlete, the discipline and I think the focus that I had as a student, and the focus of energy in sailing led to that initial identification of the opportunity, which was a windsurfer mast, even though I didn't windsurf myself. And I think what we see as an organization is the potential to cross over. We really are based in manufacturing and our innovation we feel is in being able to produce high volumes of product at low cost. And they're sophisticated.

But to begin, as our company continues to grow, to diversify into markets that have potential to be of broader utility, let's say, than the manufacture of windsurfer masts. So I'd like to just thank the opportunity here that I've had to share with you my own experience. Great.

[APPLAUSE]

VANDIVER: Peter, I've got a question for you, and I see a couple more in the audience. What-- your mast actually has some glass in them, right?

QUIGLEY: Yeah.

VANDIVER: What's the purpose of the glass?

MILGRAM: Well, actually, there are two different types of glass in the mast. And what a composite is, is it's really-- if people ever heard of this expression of an engineered material, you can tailor the properties of the structure based on what its requirements are. So for example, a windsurfer mast, it has a requirement to be extremely strong and bending, but then also where the sailor is attached to the mast, there is extreme point loading.

He holds on just by that boom. And you can imagine the forces when the person lands in the water. Unfortunately, I keep myself in the water anytime I windsurf. I don't try and go out of the water.

So there's an example where radial loads and also external impact was a real factor. So we added glass to improve the toughness of the laminate by basically just adding wall thickness, essentially. So really, in many ways, the analogy is not too dissimilar to cooking, in that you have, in a composite material, a lot of different ingredients.

There may be Kevlar fiber, different varieties of carbon fiber, different types of glass fiber, and a whole host of polymer matrices that you combine in different ways to achieve some desired properties. So that's why there's a kind of a mix.

AUDIENCE: I was very impressed with your testing apparatus. And I did a lot of that in Boeing, the test composites. I tried very hard to get a composite wing on the 777. But when that wasn't going happen, then I left Boeing and helped Bill win the America's Cup.

And when I talk to my buddies at Boeing, they say, well, don't come back until you can bring the cost down to something we can afford. So my question to you is, when are you going to bring the cost of a mast, a sailboard mast, which happens to be the same weight as my kite ski spar. When are you going to bring the cost down below $100, and how are you going to do that?

QUIGLEY: Well, that mast, actually, we sell to our OEM customer for average probably $75.

AUDIENCE: Well, that's good [INAUDIBLE].

QUIGLEY: Yeah, and one of the things about-- it's a misconception about composite materials that people think they're expensive because the materials are expensive. But oftentimes what you see is the manufacturing cost is so prohibitive that that's actually a larger driver. Because just imagine if aluminum was a novel material, or plastic was novel, people didn't have extrusion machines, or they didn't have the kinds of apparatus necessary to produce things that were useful.

So I feel, and one of the things that's motivating, you can ask in 1986, why get into a manufacturing company in Massachusetts? I think the innovation and the potential for innovation in manufacturing can really lead to cost reductions.

AUDIENCE: Well, if you can build a 3 pound mast like you showed in the picture there for $75, you've got yourself an order for a large [INAUDIBLE].

QUIGLEY: Well, the problem is if a windsurfer mast breaks, the guy falls in the water. If an airplane breaks--

[LAUGHTER]

--you've got a serious problem.

PRESENTER: They may still go in the water.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I'm talking about kite skis. But let's talk.

VANDIVER: All right. Out here.

AUDIENCE: Peter, are there any-- in the windsurfing community now, are there any sort of like vinyl LP proponents out there that like the old style masts for any sort of archaic reason?

QUIGLEY: It's pretty-- like aluminum when we started was the dominant material. And it's-- the analogy to tennis is very similar. You can't buy a wooden tennis racket now, even for the cheapest price.

Same is happening with composites. The prices are going lower and lower. But maybe-- Kim, should I pass on here or take another question?