New wave and jolt proof boat from Australia
It’s called Nauti-Craft and it’s the new hydraulic suspension system for multihull boats, designed by Nauti-Craft Pty Ltd of Dunsborough, in the west of Australia, a research and development company focused on the design and development of the suspension system for boats. The team of engineers at the Australian company drew inspiration from the suspension systems of cars, off-road vehicles, to be precise.
While land vehicles use hydraulic suspension springs to isolate the cab from the shocks and vibrations generated by rough road surfaces, those who go to sea have always suffered from the shocks, little or no dampened by the boat’s keel, generated by the impact with the waves. Combining the worlds and technologies of the nautical and automobile industries has been the decisive step. Among the creators of Nauti-Craft, the inventor and founder Chris Heyring and other members of the team that developed the company Kinetic Pty Ltd., whose suspensions were used by Mitsubishi during the Paris-Dakar and by Citroën in the World Rally Championship.
The heart of the idea is to separate the hulls from the superstructure, interposing this innovative “reactive/passive” hydraulic suspension system, allowing the boat to reduce the moving masses, hence the inertia, and allowing individual hulls to react quickly to waves and adapt to the surface of the sea, without transmitting to the deck and superstructure vibrations or shocks, reduced by 75%. The result is increased comfort, control and stability both when stationary and at high speed. In a word, safety.
Further stability improvement can be achieved with active computer-controlled suspension system control, ensuring less jolts, less roll movements and less pitching. Special features, required for rescue boats for example, and which are the prerogative of larger ships. But now, thanks to Nauti-Craft, these features can also be found in a smaller vessel with lower operating costs.