Lessons from the Riviera Racing Team On Building A Robust Zero-Emissions Boat

The Monaco Energy Boat Challenge, which takes place annually in July, acts as a unique melting pot for student innovation and industry expertise to push sustainable technology through exciting zero-emissions racing boats. The Riviera Racing team from the University of Cambridge, started a year ago with the aim of demonstrating the viability of hydrogen power, deemed this to be the ‘perfect choice of competition’ to test their creation.

Looking back on the year-long build of Meridian, their hydrogen-powered catamaran racer, team captain Harsh Sinha explains how the team approached the challenge: “We laid out two very clear objectives which we wished to achieve over the year - to provide a real world engineering challenge for innovative students at the university and to demonstrate zero emissions power sources (specifically hydrogen) for the maritime industry in a high performance vehicle.”

Coordinating the project required meticulous organisation, structured around regular team meetings while allowing for autonomy on a subsystem level: “Early in the process, progress in the team was centred around our Saturday ‘Build Days’. As the team grew, subsystems became more specialised and tasks became more numerous, the subsystems had their own supplementary build days throughout the week.” They also incorporated valuable advice from industry experts into their design and manufacturing processes ensuring that each decision they made was carefully considered.

Despite their careful planning, the team faced many challenges during the event, including battery issues: “Towards the start of the week, we suffered from a failed BMS, effectively ruining our custom battery solution and requiring immediate replacement for the boat to be viable. SBM Offshore very generously helped us with this (and with hydrogen connections), but the replacement of the battery resulted in all electrical systems needing to be reconfigured and significant sections of code needing to be rewritten.”

Combined with issues with weight and the removal of their foiling system due to safety concerns from the technical committee, the team found themselves faced with new and seemingly insurmountable problems on a daily basis. Fortunately, the team defied expectations throughout the week by coming up with novel solutions on the spot, working long hours and battling through the challenges with good humour and a smile on their faces. 

Despite the team working relentlessly to fix the issues, they were unable to race in the competition due to issues combining the new battery system with the boat’s motors. They did, however, gain some valuable testing time out on the water which will inform their strategy for the year ahead. The challenges faced only strengthened the team and have heightened their ambition for next year’s competition. Many lessons were learnt along the way including the importance of balancing ambition and robustness of design, testing and teamwork.

Harsh comments: “We gained many invaluable learning experiences which will help us in this project and beyond! We are also incredibly humbled and grateful for the support we received from members of industry (including Yachting Ventures), competition organisers and our fellow competitors - the amount of attention and faith this project has attracted has been inspirational in showing us that there is a need for such projects to move the maritime industry towards a more sustainable future.”

Looking ahead for next year, the team are preparing to reimagine, redesign and rethink the way the team works to create a truly competitive zero-emissions racing boat. With extensive structural and strategic changes in motion already and a year of hard-won learnings under their belt, Riviera Racing aims to continue to integrate innovation at the heart of their project. They are aiming to start with further testing over the coming months to identify further areas for improvement and are looking forward to showing the world what they can come up with in the next year.