Simon is an expert naval engineer, specifically in the world of composites. Simon's Carbon Ocean 82- S/Y Aegir (pictures in Simon's member page) won the prestigious International Superyacht Society’s ‘Best Sail 24m-40m’ Design award, considered as the Oscars of the marine industry.
Simon now directs companies Windship Technology working to create composite sails for supertankers (pictures on Simon's member page), requiring 60 tonnes of composites each vessel, sails that provide savings of 30% of fuel costs! Simon was interested to make these sails from our bio-composites and has been supporting research and development.
Simon helped develop early prototypes of the 80% bio-based transparent panels and with Dave Monks at his company, Rogers Advanced Composites. They helped to design a very simple system for fabricating those transparent panels using simplewooden moulds (now we are using 3D printed tool parts). Simon attended various meetings with Tony and The National Composites Centre as we designed and ran experiments on Martin's Bio-composites and thus both are contributor to and shareholder in our Automated Bio-composite Manufacture System.
Hopefully one day we can indeed make the composite cladding for the sails of Windship Technology's sails. Each of those vessels creates as much pollution as a million cars each day! Watch the video above for more information.
