Gurit helps TAG Yachts achieve performance & luxury

“I have worked with Gurit for 20 years,” New Zealand-based Young says,” so they were the obvious partner for such an ambitious project. They have a huge amount of composite design experience and the necessary skills and resources to help us meet our brief.”

As well as providing a light and extremely rigid performance sailing platform, carbon fibre construction was critical in the successful realisation of many of this remarkable yacht’s innovative design features.   

The signature Greg Young exterior styling combined with the open plan living space provided numerous engineering challenges on a boat that is capable of flying a hull.

After completion of the preliminary structural design, finite element analysis (FEA) was used extensively in the analysis of the global loads on the vessel and optimization of the structure. This ensures the vessel’s bulkheads, hull and superstructure, forebeam and prod all work in unison, whilst not imposing on the interior space.

The mast bulkhead, often a solid or near-solid bulkhead on a catamaran of this size, posed an interesting challenge for the engineers – how to provide the required support for the mast whilst not impacting on the interior design.

FEA was once again employed to refine the all-carbon bulkhead design, producing a structure that could safely support the massive mast compression loads generated by this design, while the passengers move through the opening in the mast bulkhead without any sense of the magnitude of loads being transmitted just over their heads.

The hull and deck of the TAG 60 are constructed of carbon fibre reinforcement fabrics, wetted out with Gurit’s Ampreg 22 epoxy laminating resin, either side of Gurit’s Corecell M-foam. “Gurit’s Ampreg 22 resin system has worked extremely well for us,” says Young.

“The range of hardeners allows us to adapt the system to suit the part being built.” Corecell M-foam is an ideal choice of structural foam for designers and builders requiring a lightweight, yet stiff structure.

The core acts as an I-beam, separating the skins of the laminate, in this case the carbon fibre, maintaining the shear connection between them, and therefore creating a stiff laminate whilst maintaining a lower weight than if the builder had to build up reinforcement layers to meet the same stiffness.