I need to give credit to Dr. Elkaim for his work on wing sails in a low Reynold's number environment.
His dissertation is titled, "System Identification for Precision Control of a Wingsailed GPS-guided catamaran", and was published in December 2001 at Stanford University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
I found this paper to be of great help in my deliberations on the design of a wingsail system for use in a proa sailboat. Specifically the wing design and layout, with some modifications, are what I will be using on the proa.
There will be two wing systems, one on each bow. The control system, however, will be entirely mechanical so that the wings may be controlled by the skipper of the boat. As there are fundamental differences in the way a proa is sailed and the way a catamaran is sailed (shunting vs. tacking or gybing), the wings will be used with a different control system than the one designed and built by Dr. Elkaim. I will be detailing this control system once I have built it and worked out the bugs.
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