Tensile structure expertise.

 

Our CV consists almost entirely of challenging projects which required an original problem-solving approach combined with our specialist knowledge of textiles, structures in tension, and wind engineering.

Our design skills range from creating specific global structure behavior, fluid flows, or interactions between both, to the material's micromechanical properties.

Our experience ranges from textile life-support systems for NASA to Richard Horden's beautiful Wing Tower. The sheer diversity of our projects demonstrates our reputation for design solutions using creative combinations of different technologies and physical behaviours.

The techniques and tools which we have developed for these projects give us an extraordinary flexibility in the design and modelling of unusual structures.

 

Managing innovation.

 

Innovation is a team activity. Whether we are working with artists, America 's Cup sailors, renowned architects or engineers or with NASA, we foster and encourage an open colaborative process to harness the power shared ideas.

 

IT and Design

 

Computer Aided Design is part of life. Now Computer Controlled Manufacture is bringing a revolution in design methodology.

No longer is it advantageous to repeat identical elements. The Design process is increasingly one of creating the set of rules that will generate a consistent family of components.

Customised software is the means of codifying these design rules into an algorithm. We have detailed experience of many programmable packages for computational geometry, engineering simulation, and data processing, as well as a huge library of software tools.

Our IT skills bring the exploration of algorithms into the domain of the Design Team.

 

Engineering across disciplines.

 

Our designs are often informed by direct experience in different fields of engineering, and benefit from the diversity of our knowledge in the engineering sciences.

Knowledge about Kevlar sail cloths was important background for NASA's "Advanced Inflatable Airlock". In turn, inflatable battens, now permitted under the America 's Cup Class rules, will be a direct development of the AIA technology.

The Wing Tower was designed using methods developed for sails and race cars.

In fact Relax II itself has its origins not in sailboats but in architectural structures.