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Innovation | Decision do each a bit better, then you are one percent better.” The workshops on the hill The Decision facility is locked down at the moment. The next Alinghi is being built, and to maintain secrecy, visitors are only allowed access to the small office building. As soon as a car pulls through the entrance to the parking lot, two security guards question the visitor and lead the way to the office. Nevertheless, the grounds do not have the sterile, locked-down look of the topsecret buildings in espionage films. It is a hot day, and the doors to some of the halls are open. There is rock music coming from one of the buildings. Four mountain bikes stand outside the office, and inside there are a lot of personal decorations. Decision seems like the kind of place where people feel at home. One gets the feeling that the pictures of The next Alinghi The Alinghi in production for the 2009 America’s Cup race will be a 90-foot multihull with a mast between 45 and 50 meters in height. Boats in the recent America’s Cup competitions have been about 25-meters long, but the rules have changed, and boat builders are in new territory. Cardis has estimated that building this boat will take at least 50,000 man hours. 34 Outlook 02/2008 successful projects that hang on the walls are there to bring back good memories, not to make an impression as evidence of past successes. The office has the utilitarian look that boat and airplane facilities often have – the look of a place that is designed to serve something people love. Cardis has the quiet air of a man whose work speaks for itself. It takes some prodding to get him to talk about what makes Decision special. “We are not afraid to start with a white piece of paper and think about how to do things,” he says. Decision has close ties to research, especially with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Cardis and his team suggest research topics, question the results and apply new technologies as soon as they are available. They are usually building prototypes, and this involves new methods. “Sometimes trying new ideas is easy, sometimes it is very tough,” says Cardis. It is what he has been doing for 25 years and it is deeply embedded in the culture at Decision. The company has about 30 employees now. Cardis hires mostly boat builders, people with composite skills, carpenters and painters. Employees are generally people who work with their hands. The production process is manual. Boats leave the Decision shipyard by helicopter The construction The hull of the Alinghi boats is made of carbon, aluminum and synthetic fiber aramid. These elements are made into a kind of sandwich, with two thin fiberreinforced faces and a thick, light honeycomb core. The result is rigid, strong and incredibly light. To build the hull, Decision first makes a mold, into which it layers the superthin sheets of carbon fibers embedded
Any new construction in composite materials starts with the creation of a wooden plug in an epoxy resin. These layers are then exposed to a vacuum, which compresses the carbon mat, so that the fibers bind uniformly and there are as few air pockets as possible. This creates the outside “skin” of the Alinghi, which is only about 3 mm thick. The honeycomb, made of aluminum and aramid, is put on top of that skin, and then another layer of the carbon fiber is placed on top of the honeycomb, creating the sandwich. The whole thing is baked in an oven for 15 hours, during which time the epoxy in the outside layers melts and binds the materials. This carbon composite is lighter and more rigid than steel or aluminum. Unlike the metals, however, the material cannot carry an equal load in all directions. It is strong in the direction of the long carbon fibers and weak at a 90-degree angle to the fibers. This makes it very important to know exactly where the strain on a structure will be. Once that is known, weight can be saved by providing extra strength only where it is needed. A wide range of applications Decision has made many sailboats using processes similar to those used for the Alinghis, including the 10 boats in its Decision 35 series. Cardis and the Swiss Multihull Owners Association came up Outlook 02/2008 35
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