Design of an electric superyacht tender

Abstract

The Dutch yacht builder Zeelander Yachts is working on a new brand Dutchcraft wherefore they want to follow the transition from combustion drive-trains to electric drive-trains by creating a 25-feet electric tender. The company never built a tender or electric tender before. Causing, that the company has no knowledge about electric drive-trains or tenders. The objective of this master project is to analyze the opportunities and challenges that are involved with the introduction of the electric drive-train for a tender, in order to know how the company Dutchcraft can enter the market successfully and which unique user benefits they can focus on. To address the objective of this master project a research by design approach is performed. It starts with an internal and an external analysis that resulted in a design direction. From there, ideas were created and converged into a conceptual proposal that was further elaborated to show the feasibility of the proposal. Concluding from the research, the transition to an electric drive-train for a tender creates new opportunities which Dutchcraft can use to enter the market successfully. The most important transition resulting from this project is the transformation of the shape of the deck which is due to the different electric drive-train configurations. This transformation was also achieved for a 25-feet Dutchcraft and created an entire flat and empty deck. This allows the users to customize their tender for the proposes they desire. It is recommended that Dutchcraft focuses offering a multi-purpose electric tender which is also able to support land activities. The design of the interior of tender should have a more luxurious look and feel than their current Dutchcraft 50 model but still match the exterior design. Because Dutchcraft never composed electric drive-train, it is recommended to use the complete package of Piktronik.