Overview

The SuMoth Challenge brings together students across the world in a competition to design, manufacture and sail a Sustainable Moth (IMCA). The ultimate goal of the SuMoth is to promote novel sustainable design and manufacturing techniques to the industrial ground. The students start from a blank page, allowing them to include sustainability in different aspects of the boat, from innovative design features, to material selection for its components and moulds, to the manufacturing processes and the end-of-life plans. Unfamiliar with traditional Moths, the soon-to-be engineers are not constrained to follow the state-of-the-art manufacturing methods of foiling boats. Their innovative ideas will be the tipping actions from the traditional manufacturing methods towards more sustainable ones by putting the target into a negative CO2 emissions industrially. The three Foiling SuMoth challenge evaluations held since its foundation in 2018 allowed the teams to showcase their ideas, challenge the carbon-composites status-quo designs using bio-based alternative materials and manufacturing techniques that surprised the experts in the Jury. To support the students coming from different backgrounds, an open-access ongoing series of technical masterclasses was developed with the most prominent academics, designers and builders around the world.