This study provides a global, detailed, and complete energy-saving map of strong ocean currents from the absolute geostrophic velocities calculated from satellite altimetry data, with the focus on the strong Western Boundary Currents (WBCs) in the global ocean. Theoretically, the WBCs with speeds of 2–3 knots can reduce fuel consumption by 25–50% for vessels at a sailing speed of 6 knots. The f...

sail:lab, as an interdisciplinary project of mathematicians and sport scientists, uses the physical description of sailing to develop an E-Learning component, which can be integrated in Blended Learning scenarios in both departments. By calculating the forces and moments due to wind and current which take effect at sail, hull, rudder, and fin, the movement of a jolly-boat is visualized. An inst...

This paper introduces two sport-related projects conducted by the Satellite Positioning and Orientation Research Team (SPORT) at RMIT University – the speed sailing world record challenge and development of a smart GPS rower tracking system. In the first project, both traditional and contemporary surveying technologies are investigated to assist the Macquarie Speed Sailing Team to reliably reco...

Sailors are at risk of injury and an understanding of the risks and causes of injury are important in helping to reduce their frequency and severity. Injuries are specific to the class of sailing. In elite Olympic-class sailing the incidence of injury is approximately 0.2 injuries/athlete/year, with the lumbar and thoracic spine and the knee most commonly injured. Poor hiking technique and inad...

This study set out to evaluate the effectiveness of a sailing and learning-to-sail rehabilitation protocol in a sample of patients diagnosed with severe mental disorders. The study was a randomized, crossover, waiting-list controlled trial, following recruitment in the Departments of Mental Health of South Sardinia. Participants were outpatients diagnosed with severe mental disorders, recruited...

In this paper we report on the past evaluation of the joint Flemish-Dutch STEVIN programme in the field of HLT for Dutch (HLTD). STEVIN was a 11.4 M euro programme on HLT for Dutch that was jointly organised and financed by the Flemish and Dutch governments. The aim was to provide academia and industry with basic building blocks for a linguistic infrastructure for the Dutch language. An indepen...

car body acceleration is an important factor affecting track safety and ride comfort, which are two primary aspects of railway systems. though track level is an important source of wagon body acceleration, no quantitative relation between them is available and the aim of this paper is to propose a method to address this issue. to do so, car body acceleration is determined using a 10 dof simulat...

The Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem (LSFRP) poses a large financial burden on liner shipping firms. During repositioning, vessels are moved between services in a liner shipping network. The LSFRP is characterized by chains of interacting activities, many of which have costs that are a function of their duration; for example, sailing slowly between two ports is cheaper than sailing qu...