In the harbor of Marseille, Syroco makes boats fly
Posted July 31. 2022 at 11:00
It’s an insane goal that the most successful French kitesurfer, Alex Caizergues, has set himself: to smash the sailing speed record on the water. Since 2012, it has been owned by Australian Paul Larsen aboard his Vestas Sailrocket 2, which has exceeded 150 km/h powered by the force of the wind alone. A kite board will not be enough: to achieve this, the tricolor champion has undertaken to build a strange flying machine above the water caught in a vice between a sail and a foil.
“Our project calls into question the fundamentals of shipbuilding,” he explains. On board the company he has judiciously baptized “Syroco”, named after the powerful hot, dry breath that sweeps across North Africa and the Western Mediterranean, around twenty engineers and researchers have been shaking up physics for three years. fluids. “A sailboat works by combining the opposition of four forces on the hull, the keel and the sails. Our machine brings them back to two,” explains naval architect Olivier Taillard, co-founder of Syroco and technical director.
A 15 second flight
The 1/3 scale prototype, which the team has been testing for a year in the harbor of Marseille, confirms their intuition. To reduce water friction, their “speed craft” only plunges a long foil in the shape of an aerial fuselage with an inverted wing into the water to pull the machine through the waves. In contrast, a cleverly sized kite sail takes advantage of the wind to balance the tension. Between the two, an aerodynamic aerial nacelle, designed to accommodate two passengers like in the cockpit of a jet, rises above the water.
“The difficulty of properly distributing the masses so that the whole thing stabilizes”, explains Alex Caizergues. To pass this phase, the carbon prototype is currently undergoing serious mechanical tests. “It rises to the sky, dives, unhooks… We are learning to master its piloting”, describes one of the engineers present at this test stage. For the moment, the longest flight of the machine lasted only the time of a shooting, that is to say… 15 seconds.
Eight patents in the pipeline
The team plans to cruise at Zodiac speed by the end of the summer, then gradually reach a more sustained pace. The full-scale prototype with its nacelle spanning 7.20 meters and its 50 square meter sail, double that of a competition sail, should be completed within a year. Alex Caizergues will then tackle the record he hopes to beat “before the 2024 Olympics”.
To succeed, Syroco has mobilized a good part of the 6 million euros needed, thanks to a funding round of 600,000 euros carried out in 2019 to launch the project, aid of 800,000 euros from Bpifrance and sponsorship revenue provided by the watches Hamilton, Taittinger champagne and the South region. A second fundraiser is planned for the start of the school year.
digital twin
The company also relies on its own sales: its research work has already produced several breakthrough innovations and eight patents are in the works. “Our goal is to produce solutions to improve the energy and ecological efficiency of anything that floats,” explains Alex Caizergues. In addition to its in-house research, Syroco works in co-engineering on around fifteen innovation projects.
The Marseille-based company has notably supplied the shipbuilder Hynova with a revolutionary foil that will improve the energy efficiency of its fuel cell-powered ship project by at least 25%. The two companies collaborated very early on on the design and study of the technical characteristics of the hull.
By integrating a specific sheet slightly set back towards the rear, the engineers were able to change the trim of the ship and thus modify the balance of forces retained by the water. Consequence: a decrease in friction reduces the hydrodynamics of the ship. “With less drag, the engine is more efficient, which made it possible to eliminate one of the four 500 kg batteries initially planned to propel this 12-meter vessel”, explains the president of Syroco.
The best business prospects, however, lie with the digital twin that the team has designed for the project. “Thanks to this double, we can model the energy efficiency of ships according to different propulsion configurations, and thus precisely measure the impact of carbon emissions on maritime routes”, details Olivier Taillard.
The platform, called “Syroco Efficient Ship”, is also of interest to shipbuilders to analyze the impact of a choice of propeller, foil or sail. The company’s next fundraising will be used to develop such prospects.
Syroco in numbers
Creation date : 2019
Technical objective: 150 km/h on water
Workforce: 20 people
Project amount: 6 million euros