Model

The TriFoiler project began with this model in 1981. It was inspired by boats like Crossbow and Sidd Shutt's hydrofoil trimaran. It started out as a desire to break the world speed record for sailboats.

Notice how big the foils were. This was typical - we would start out big and learn that they worked better small like this;

For Greg's senior project in school, he decided to write a Velocity Prediction Program (VPP), redesign the model based on the VPP, make changes to the model and test it to verify the VPP. It was a very ambitious project. The VPP predicted that much smaller foils would go faster and that the boat would not tip over with a much bigger sail. The main question put to the VPP was; if the weather foil pulls down to increase stability, would the increase in power make up for the increase in drag? The answer was yes, so Ketterman doubled the size of the sail and reduced the size of the foild by 50%. He also went to the L shaped foils and the whole amas pitched.