Saw that my old university had published a master thesis on dinghy foiling. Some of the theory also applies to us who run “human balanced systems” :)=
Perhaps some evening read for at least @3rd_ave_Lien, who seems to take a very analytical approach to her projects 
https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8938139&fileOId=8938140
I definitely will read it! Thanks…
Hi! You’ll be glad to know I started reading the paper… So far, everything is explained very simply and clearly, it’s a great overview. Thanks! It also is a good resource if you need parameters for CFD simulations.
Perhaps some evening read for at least @3rd_ave_Lien, who seems to take a very analytical approach to her projects
Well, we are nerds… Also the water is too cold these days for the regular trial and error approach!
There’s more! Here, testing the heat dissipation property of the aluminum mast (more experimental than analytical, I guess: heating one end and measuring how the heat propagates). Conclusion is that the mast is not very good as a heat sink.
You can probably get your hands on a couple of power resistors pretty easily? It would be interesting to try mast cooling properties with some deterministic heat load. For example if we assume 90% efficiency in the VESC, then a typical cruising load (1.5kW maybe?) would produce about 150W of heat. Load the mast clamp with that amount of heat and see how it behaves thermally?
So yes, we have these resistors that we mounted on a 4"x6" 3/16th thick aluminum alloy plate: with 25W, the plate got to 200 ºF in 20 minutes, so with 150W you can probably fry your lunch while foiling…
When we have a better idea of our ESC’s performance, we’ll do other experiments, attaching the plate to the mast head. We are still hoping our ESC can run without water cooling…
If you have information about your ESC, I can run the experiment for you. But in fact, I think that the performance will vary a lot with the mast: in the hair dryer experiment, I later found that the connection between the mast plate and the mast itself was not good.
Is there some difference when foil/half foil is submerged in streaming water? Also some minimal cooling from air when during flight? Does that bad thermal connection get less sucky?
Some thermal paste sealing possible?
I think I can improve the thermal property of my foil mast by making a better connection between mast and mast plate. Also when starting in the water, which is when we need more power, the ESC will be cooled by the water, and yes, more cooling when in flight…
Another solution is to request a “touch down” to cool the ESC with water if it’s getting too hot (we’ll have something to signal that).
We are waiting to know how much power the ESC dissipates before doing more experiments. ESC is being developed and tested.
Out of curiosity, are you making the FW yourself as well or making it based on VESC or something else? Very interesting project though. Please share details when/if you can 
