In Fall 2016, I became an honorary member of the ocean engineering major at MIT by being on a team project with all five of the OEs. In that class, we built a rigid wing sail catamaran boat that was actuated with a servo-controlled tail and a servo-controlled dual rudder.
Out of that class came a bid for us to build a new boat that could compete in the Micro Trans-Atlantic challenge and simultaneously satisfy our thesis requirement. With a $10,000 grant from the Ocean Engineering department, we built a 2.4m aluminum and fiberglass small-waterplane-area twin hull (SWATH), that was powered electrically with a vertical-axis wind turbine.
My primary responsibility was to characterize and integrate the VAWT. Because we needed the turbine to work in low-wind scenarios and self-start, we played around with hybrid drag and lift turbines. After prototyping our own, we purchased an off-the-shelf turbine that had both the lift (Darrieus) and drag (Savonius) components combined. We characterized the turbine in the famous MIT Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel, and designed/built the interface components to the boat. In the process, we also learned why wind turbines might not work so well on a boat - they still require relatively high winds to overcome friction and their area still comes with a decent dose of drag.
