The team is composed of 18 first-year Master’s students at ENSAM (École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts et Métiers), drawn from a wide range of engineering specialities and united by the hands-on culture of the Arts et Métiers. With the support of five faculty members, who provide technical guidance and ensure continuity from one generation to the next, we are ready to take on the challenge ahead. Building on the work and efforts of our predecessors, we aim to refine what previous teams achieved and push our boat further in both performance and reliability, while developing the practical engineering skills that prepare us for real-world maritime innovation.
This year, we are placing particular emphasis on improving our propellers in order to make our contra-rotating toroidal propellers fully operational. This design combines two complementary ideas: the toroidal geometry, which reduces tip vortices and underwater noise while improving efficiency, and a contra-rotating arrangement that recovers rotational energy from the flow to deliver more thrust for the same power. Our objective is twofold: to achieve higher performance than in previous years with a more reliable boat, refining the components and systems inherited from earlier teams so they work consistently under race conditions, and to compete in the Innovation Tech Talk Prize with our new propeller design.
Through this work, we aim to turn an ambitious technical concept into a proven, on-water solution and to share what we learn with the wider Challenge community.
