« After roughly three years of hard work and long days, we are standing here with the first prototype of the Wing 560 sail, ready to show it to you — to the world — and to take orders », said Magnus MackAldener, interim CEO and Head of R&D at Oceanbird.
“This is truly a milestone. Together, we are advancing towards fossil free shipping, said Andreas Carlson, Swedish Minister for Infrastructure and Housing, at the inauguration. “We need pioneers who are willing to take risks, to innovate and to lead the way into the green industrial transformation and this is a great example of leadership. Oceanbird stands as proof of this success,” he continued.
The Wing 560 has thus become not only a visible symbol in the Landskrona landscape, but also a focal point for training, customer demonstrations and technological optimisation.
A sandwich construction
The result of three and a half years of research and development, the rigid sail designed by Oceanbird is 40 metres high and 14 metres wide. Its core is made of high-strength steel, while its aerodynamic surface is based on a sandwich construction with thin layers of fibreglass surrounding a recycled plastic core.
In total, no fewer than 370,000 PET bottles were used in the manufacture of this wing.“If you have solid steel or solid composite, it is quite heavy. To avoid that, we add the core material of PET in the middle to create a distance so that we get higher bending stiffness” explains Ho-Ann Chen, composite design engineer at Oceanbird.
The sail system consists of two segments: a main sail with a steel mast that transfers thrust to the ship, and a movable flap that creates a camber, optimising the amount of thrust generated by the wind, just like traditional sailing ships. ” We had a clear mission: to prove that wind can once again play a significant role in powering ships,” recalled Magnus MackAldener.
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