Vripack Studio (Netherlands), one of the international leaders in nautical engineering and architecture since 1961, has announced the patent of a new hull, designed and conceived for (and in collaboration with) one of its loyal customers. The new hull, called Radical Slide Hull, is so innovative it deserves an international patent (and this is a very rare news).
Premises weren’t good: Captain Jaap de Bruijn, a long time customer, addressed to Vripack Studio with an innovative idea to make boats more stable and with higher performances in bad sea conditions. De Bruijn is an expert of boats and bad weather: his boat offers tender and support services for merchant ships in the North Seas. After all, Vripack has achieved over 7,300 projects, it has won tens of nautical design awards and it can count on a team of very skilled engineers. Everybody remembers the first meeting, where De Bruijn explained his idea to Vripack’s marine engineer, Peter Bouma. ” It is impossible to do what you want”.
But being a captain in the North Seas make you obstinate. So, Jaap de Bruijn worked hard to achieve what he wanted; he decided to literally cut the hull to try any different shape. His empirical experimentation lasted ten years and it was never supported by any algorythm or formula. The captain shared all his discoveries, tests and mistakes with Vripack, until he convinced them to make a try. ” I only knew that, when it happened to me to face a storm with my boat and a team of experts, everybody was astonished by the soft attitude of the hull, even though we were sailing at 25 knots and with a 2,5-metre-wave. Everybody desired my boat”.
The excellent result of Bruijn’s intuitions and Vripack’s availability (after all, the studio’s slogan is ” we engineer your dreams”) is Radical Slide Hull, a hull whose lines increase efficiency by 35% more than current averages, particularly good for fast boats with large weight variations. The first ship provided with Slide Hull is SC Amethyst (20 metres). It belongs to Sima Charters, the company where Jaap de Bruijn works. Some expert pilots who tested it in terrible conditions said that ” it seemed to sail on a pillow”, despite a 25-knot-speed and 2.5-metre-waves. At 21 knots, Amethyst (45 tons) has a consumption of 180 litres: hull lines make water flows on it like in a slide ( hence the name)
