J/111

Introduction

Every now and then a boat comes along that fulfills a real need in the market. Many of them have been J/Boats. The J/111 is sleek, speedy, and a one-design 36 footer that daysails, races, and weekend cruises like no other. J/111 is an easy-to-handle, comfortable-to-sail boat that accelerates quickly, slices to windward at 7+ knots and hits double-digit speeds downwind.

Versatility is Key to One-Design Success.

The J/111 is designed to be the best performing, easiest-to-sail boat of its size on the market, while offering the creature comforts needed (6′ headroom) to satisfy the occasional overnight cruise. It’s all about versatility and the joy of sailing – how to have the most fun out of the time and resources invested. This is the J Boats formula for success in building local one-design fleets.

In many sailing areas there aren’t enough owners who can rationalize the expense of campaigning a single purpose (“non-versatile”) race boat. There may be 20-30 owners nationally who are willing to fund a travel program to a pinnacle event like Key West Race Week, but without the versatility to appeal to many owners, local fleets never reach critical mass needed for long-term success. The J/111 is the next generation one-design J/Boat designed to fulfill the legacy of its predecessors.

Performance.

How will she sail? Hang on to your hats! This boat flies. J/111 accelerates up to speed in the slightest of puffs, thanks to a generous, high-aspect rig combined with a low wetted surface hull. Sail efficiency is gained by maximizing the sail luff lengths and reducing foot lengths to create a balanced, nonoverlapping sail plan. When the wind and waves are up, J/111 pops up and delivers the dinghy-like, exhilarating rides that many modern designs struggle to because of over-tweaking to handicap rules that encourage heavy, unbalanced and non-planing hull shapes. Turning the corner upwind, J/111’s efficient hull form and low vertical center of gravity will kick-in to provide the sweet weatherly handling J/Boats are known for.

J/111 Carbon Nanotube Technology

In the world of composite materials there are always the issues of trade-offs in terms of cost/ performance/ durability and the practical limits of production.  Witness the recent advances made in engineering/ design to construct BMWO’s massive wing sail.  Or, follow the thread in Sailing Anarchy’s multihull forum on C-Class cats that describe “monster garage technology” used to create state-of-the-art C-Class cats capable of sailing at near ice-boat wind speed multiples~ 3x faster than the wind.  These boats are built to the extreme limits- sail to win one regatta and if it breaks afterwards, you won the engineering arms race.

In the case of the J/111, Zyvex approached J/Boats and Hall Spars regarding their ground-breaking use of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in both flat panel and tubular composites.  Much of Zyvex’s work has been the usual cloak-and-dagger stuff of spy novels, such as ultra-lightweight unmanned surveillance craft, reinforced with carbon nanotubes, operating 24×7 over certain Middle Eastern/ Asian theatres.

Military applications aside, here are the simple facts for our commercial world –Zyvex’s carbon nanotubes are hollow, extremely lightweight tubes 5 nanometers in diameter and about 30 nanometers long (e.g. a smaller “framework” than the 32 nanometer process used in INTEL Corp’s latest Itanium “Tukwila” microprocessor designs with over 2 BILLION transistors).  These tubes have a special coating (”Kentera”) which forms a bridge between the CNTs and the epoxy resin. The epoxy resin/CNT mix is then squeezed under 200 psi of pressure into a carbon fibre pultruded fabric called Arovex.  This “pre-preg Arovex” is then wrapped onto a Hall Spars mandrel, then autoclaved cured at 90 psi at 250 F. degrees.  At these pressures, epoxy has the viscosity of alcohol and the carbon nanotubes naturally disperse into the recesses between the carbon fibers in the laminate (e.g. providing connections along the “load lines” of the carbon fibre itself).  Remember, a single carbon fibre thread is about 0.5-1.0mm (500 microns), or about 10x the thickness of human hair (which is 50 microns or 50,000 nanometers thick on average).  So, you can fit a LOT of carbon nano-tubes into the “empty/ dead” space between the fibers- displacing a lot of “dead epoxy” resin unnecessary to maintain the matrix of the carbon threads in the pre-preg fabric (see picture depicting this process). 

The result?  The J/111 spar is built with the most advanced carbon fibre known today in the sailing world- more advanced than the materials used by BMW/Oracle 17 engineers and the current state-of-the-art in the C-Class cat world.

According to Mike Nemeth, Chief of Commercial & Defense Applications for Zyvex, “At the same weight of another laminate schedule, our materials demonstrate a 10% improvement in fracture toughness and 25% greater flexural modulus. For further comparison, our military hulls weigh 30% less than traditional carbon fibre laminates when designed to the performance capabilities of our materials.” 

Dimensions