INSIDE NORTH ADVANCED MATERIALS: WHERE INNOVATION BEGINS

There’s a story about Lowell North – the genius who started North Sails back in 1957 – and it tells how he attached different strips of potential new sail cloth material to the radio aerial on his car. He would then periodically check the strips to see how well the cloth was holding up to fluttering in the wind. It was a simple but effective fatigue test, and probably the first example of materials testing in sailmaking.

It's a typical Lowell North-story, and one of the reasons why, back in those days, he was always pegged as the science-guy, with his graduate education in civil engineering and an early career in the aerospace industry. Over the following decades, Lowell North’s scientific, innovative approach has been threaded into the North Sails DNA. Paul Hayden, North Technology Group’s Technical Director, now spearheads the work of advancing this mission and ensuring North Sails remains at the forefront of material innovation. The Englishman leads technical product innovation across the business, but particularly in the North Advanced Materials group. No surprise: Oxford University had to go back 16 years to find someone who graduated with a better mark in Materials Science.     

Paul Hayden’s approach to the way that North Sails develops and deploys technology remains true to Lowell North’s endless curiosity and creativity. It’s a belief not just in good design, but in engineering excellence and the scientific method – with its approach of rigorous testing for every idea. The ultimate goal is all about developing a better product for the customer, be that in performance, durability, or both. For Paul Hayden, remaining number one is far from a given, and relies on relentless hard work and constant innovation. 

Much of the innovation starts at ground zero with the North Advanced Materials group. This has been born from what was previously called North Cloth. “One of the fundamental parts of our product is material technology and the materials science underneath it. The establishment of North Advanced Materials is just a recognition that this is a key pillar of our business,” explained Hayden. Perhaps unique for the industry, the group’s philosophy is that only by understanding all aspects of the chemistry – right down to the molecular level – can the products be fully optimized for performance and durability. 

“When we are working on product you won't hear the team just using terms like fiber, resin, and fabric,” explained Hayden. “You will hear them talking about interfaces, surface energy, and residual reactant, for example. The conversation must be up to that level, because if you don't understand the material and the process, and how well in control of the process you are, you don't know whether you're an inch away from a cliff edge, or a mile. It’s about the fundamentals; because if you don't understand it all, you can't optimize it and you can't get the best value for your customer, or your business.” 

The North Advanced Materials group is around 25-strong, spread across the US, UK and Sri Lanka. “The roles range from graduate engineers in labs, testing and developing new materials and new products, to guys that are on the process and production engineering side…optimizing, changing the process machinery. The big hub is in Sri Lanka. We have a fantastic lab there where we're doing a lot of testing across the whole material range,” said Hayden. The laboratory’s equipment is more reminiscent of a university facility, right down to the infrared spectrometer. It’s just another indication of how seriously Hayden and his team take the need to understand the chemical building blocks they work with. 

The group tackles a wide remit, from a variety of angles. “When we develop a product, I tend to think about it from a market point of view, what's the application? But at the same time, if you're talking about pure innovation, then that can come from anywhere. One area where it comes from is outside sources, parallel industries, particularly if you look at sustainability.” Hayden cites high performance paints and flexible packaging as two, perhaps counterintuitive, industries that he monitors closely for ideas, inspiration and useful developments. The advantage of this approach is that remarkable innovation can come in areas where the need for it wasn’t initially burning that brightly. 

The materials and processes involved in 3Di manufacturing remain a core research area for the North Advanced Materials group and provide examples of how the mix of product development, problem solving, and serendipity can work. The 3Di material – based on a technology called spread filament – is the most efficient sail cloth on the market. This is because it matches the fiber precisely to the loads that will be applied to the material, and then bonds it with pre-impregnated resin, rather than adding an extra layer (such as Mylar) to hold the fibers together. The process pares back the materials used to the minimum required for the task. 

“In sailmaking, the constant challenge is achieving the ideal balance of modulus, minimal weight, and long-term durability. Recent advances in fiber processing and manufacturing techniques have allowed us to add new process and manufacturing technology. This opens new ways to combine materials – spread filaments, woven fibers, other substrates – in configurations that were previously impossible. The ability to understand and engineer these combinations more precisely means we can tailor cloth properties to match the specific loads and design requirements of any type of sail and use.  

This kind of flexibility represents a significant step forward. Rather than relying on a limited range of off-the-shelf materials and accepting compromises, we can apply the learnings from nearly 20 years of development of 3Di composites into new products at a much more granular level. The result is sails that are lighter, stronger, and more durable – not through any single breakthrough material, but through smarter ways of combining and optimizing what's available”, said Hayden. 

The applications for the new manufacturing process didn’t end there though, producing a material development targeted at sail cloth for gennakers and asymmetric spinnakers. “The designers were struggling to get the exact material that they wanted… So, let's listen to what they think they want, and then we'll work out what we can develop for them and see if we can cross that bridge,” explained Hayden, describing the process of problem solving that has led to the new sail cloth product line. If the material doesn’t exist, then the North Advanced Materials group will create it. It’s this extraordinary, ground-up approach that allows North Sails to maintain a technology advantage in the industry. 

Meanwhile, North Actionsports were looking – along with much of the wing foils and kite industry – for any technology that would create a lighter, stiffer airframe. It’s these qualities that create power efficiently for the sailor. The spread filament technology initially looked the obvious solution, with its precise mix of fiber and pre-impregnated resin. The difficulty, explained Hayden, was that “the stitching starts to pull through, the material's so light and it doesn't have anything for the stitching to really grab onto.” The materials group then realized – in one of those lightbulb moments that the team and the company strive to create fertile conditions for – that this was a problem that the new gennaker material would solve. The serendipitous moment means that spread filament technology – and lighter, stiffer airframes – will soon be coming to wing foils. 

It's a long road from these moments of inspiration to a finished product or innovation though, and North has a rigorous testing process. “A new product introduction or new technology introduction is a risk-based assessment. First, we want to see the big risks as early as possible. When we've done the quick, initial evaluation, and it looks like something might be a goer, the best thing to do is get it to a full system demonstration as soon as possible. i.e. get a demo sail built and on the water.” 

This full-size test is just the first of a series of gates. “If that goes ok, you start to invest in the testing. It's not just a couple of little tests here and there. It's a full program. And always something will come up, and then you must address it,” said Hayden. This process can lead to many iterations and some very innovative testing.  

Hayden described a new product that the team tested to ensure it could survive being stuffed into a bag 150 times and still maintain good performance. “We could just get some guys to stuff it in a bag 150 times. Or we could come up with our own simple machine to do it in a repeatable way – whatever gets the job done. A lot of what we do is accelerated testing because everything looks good on day one, but you're worried about year three.” 

It would be remiss to talk with North’s Advanced Materials guru and not ask him to look into a crystal ball and tell us what’s coming next. “If you went to the lab, you’d see the amount of data we have. So, okay, can I use these new sorts of [AI] tools to select a material? I think we can take that data, and we can start to use some of those tools to help us configure product.” 

“And there are definitely some shifts in material and in the manufacturing process that are happening… The chemistry's moving on all the time,” said Hayden. He has a clear vision of the future for the business. “North Advanced Materials is about really being the best at this and not just at a surface level, it's going deep enough to really understand it. We can make the product better in the way we design it, configure it, or make the [manufacturing] process better. When I joined, I thought, well, maybe this technology's old now, maybe the guys have squeezed every bit of juice out of it, but there's plenty more juice to come.”