Principles of Yacht Design

Principles of Yacht Design is both comprehensible to amateurs and comprehensive for professionals. It follows the design of a 40-foot cruising sailboat from the first sketch to the final weight, strength, and sail area calculations, with tables, charts, and diagrams to let the reader adapt the process to any design. This edition is revised and expanded to cover powerboats as well as sailboats.

Lars Larsson, a naval architect, is Professor of Hydrodynamics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is President of Flowtech International and was a scientist at SSPA Maritime Consulting from 1971-89. He has written around 100 papers on computational fluid dynamics applied to ship hydrodynamics, and has taught many academic and public courses in yacht design.

A sailor since birth, Lars Larsson was instructor in aero and hydrodynamics to the 1984 Swedish Olympic sailing team, was design consultant to the Swedish America's Cup team from 1975-80, the US America II team from 1984-87, and the Italian Il Moro di Venezia from 1989-92.

Rolf E Eliasson, a yacht design/construction engineer specialising in yacht structures, runs his own design company for both production and one-off yachts. More than 4000 yachts have been built from his designs over the past 25 years. Between 1976 and 1982 he won three international design competitions and was runner up in a fourth.

Rolf Eliasson has been a member of working groups within the EU since 1990, setting ISO standards for yacht safety, stability and scantlings. He has built six yachts himself--in steel, wood and using different GRP methods--and is one of the forerunners in using computer techniques for yacht design and for the evaluation of new designs.