An innovative boat designed by the Basque Country technology Park

A group of students from the ESTIA engineering school are participating in the HydroContest competition, by creating a reduced model of an innovative and energy-efficient boat.  The project is being built within the EneRGEA (Izarbel) and Compositadour (Technocité) platforms.

Hydrocontest is an international competition open to students all around the world. The aim is to design, produce and pilot a reduced model of a particularly innovative boat in terms of energy performance.  Organised by the Hydros foundation, the 5^th edition of HydroContest will take place in Saint-Tropez from 2 to 9 September 2019 and will welcome some thirty teams.

A team from ESTIA, made up of 11 second-year students and led by Cécile Leroy Dubief, has taken up this challenge.  ‘A group of six students was already working on the subject, and at the start of the last school year, the idea was put forward to the Boga ESTIA organisation, which brings together students in ESTIA who are sailing enthusiasts.  With ten other students, we launched the project last December’, she tells us.

The organisers of the Hydrocontest supply the same electric motor and batteries to all competitors, who then build their reduced-model remote-controlled boat, which will compete with other vessels on water.  The Saint-Tropez regattas will take place in three rounds: mass transport with a 200kg load, lightweight transport with a 20kg load and a long-distance race in which the boat must achieve the maximum number of runs around the circuit in a given time frame.

The ESTIA team has designed a 2m-long catamaran, with a bulb holding the motor and the batteries. The hull moulds were cast in polyurethane foam thanks to a robot at the Compositadour platform in Technocité. The hulls in composite materials (fibreglass, carbon fibre and epoxy resin) were then also manufactured with the help of the expertise and equipment in Compositadour.

The electronic components were made at ESTIA’s EneRGEA (Electric and Automated Engineering for Renewable Energies) platform, based in the Izarbel Technology Park.  The team aims to complete the boat in late April, just before the summer internships, and then to meet up in Saint-Tropez at the beginning of September.

 FaceBook page of the ESTIA project: https://www.facebook.com/Hydrocontest

The HydroContest web site: www.hydrocontest.org/fr