The 12th annual MEBC – Monaco Energy Boat Challenge – took place July 2 – 6 and was another shining success in showcasing the rapid advance of non fossil-fuel propulsion – where it is at now and what lies ahead for the future.
The MEBC is unique in that it brings together university students, commercial electric boat manufacturers and the larger yachting industry with races, demonstrations, technical presentations, a job fair, mentoring program and round table discussions. In the university segment alone over 1,000 students participated, coming from 42 institutions in 20 countries.
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There are four classes of racing at the Challenge. The Energy Class and AI Class are only open to university teams, the SeaLab Class includes entries from both university teams and commercial ventures and the Open Sea Class is reserved for boats available for sale.
Boundaries were pushed in every class, a number of records were broken, and at the same time the racing was taking place on the water, there were two conferences being held indoors at the host Yacht Club de Monaco: one on advanced yachting and another on hydrogen and alternative fuels.
Energy Class
The Energy Class is the heart of the MEBC. Each of the university teams takes a one-design catamaran hull provided by the YCM and adds their own propulsion, steering and controls. There are regulations about weight and other criteria, but the main regulation is that the boats cannot use any fossil fuel.
Each university has a section reserved for them in ‘the paddocks’ along the quayside of the club, and in each of those there are students from as far away as South Africa, Indonesia and India frantically doing final prep on boats they have been working on for the past 12 months.
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The intense concentration of students tweaking motor, battery, solar and control systems is interrupted every few minutes by one of the teams dollying their boat along the quay to the launching ramp, another breaking out in a celebratory song or yet another team moaning in disappointment at the failure of a key element not working as planned.
After being certified by the MEBC Technical Committee, the boats compete in four different races: Speed, Slalom, Endurance and Championship – each of which requires different capabilities.
The Speed race is a flat out time trial held along the coastline outside the harbour of the Club. The Slalom is also a timed event, in the same stretch of water, so it requires speed combined with manoeuvrability. In the Endurance event the boats try to complete as many one kilometre (≈ .75 mi) laps as they are able to in three hours.
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The Championship Races are a knockout competition held within the tight confines of the Yacht Club harbour which takes the speed and steering of slalom to a whole other level as the pilots weave around multiple markers as fast as they can and then make a mad dash to the finish line.
You would think it would be difficult to build a boat that does well in all events. For instance a more powerful motor for the Speed event would also be heavier, so might be a bit of a drawback in the Slalom and Championship – and also might burn up the batteries quickly in the Endurance Race.
However, the University of Bologna Argonauts Team – UniBoAT – managed to build a boat that did it all. They came in first in the Speed event (tied with Italian compatriots Università di Genova), first in Slalom, first in Endurance and put on a masterful display in the Championship races, beating all comers by a healthy margin in each race.
This is the fourth year in a row that UniBoAT has won the Energy Class, and their story now goes beyond the MEBC and is a great demonstration of the advances that come out of the Challenge.
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After their victory in 2023 – and in their quest for continual improvement – the team wanted a more powerful and efficient motor. But instead of buying one off the shelf they decided to design their own in-house. Led by Professor Nicolò Cavina, the UofB students put together a terrific 15 kiloWatt (≈ 20 hp) electric outboard and have now founded a company, Competr (https://competr.it/) , to manufacture and market their patented product.
Two things make the Competr stand out. One, it uses a contra-rotating propeller, which is actually two propellers spinning in different directions at the same time on the same shaft. This creates much less turbulence than a one-propeller motor and increases efficiency by as much as 16%. The other distinctive aspect is that the motor is a tractor motor – the propellers face toward the bow of the boat and pull it through the water rather than pushing it from...
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