A Note on the Cover Photograph

The cover photograph shows a crew of four in an Atlantic 85 inshore lifeboat, widely deployed around coastlines of the UK by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). The lifeboat is an example of a rigid inflatable boat (RIB), designed specifically for high speed, manoeuvrability, and safety in operation. Its name honours Atlantic College in Wales, where the design originated. The boat illustrates several benefits of polymers in engineering. The hull has a sandwich construction, with two skins of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic separated by a closed-cell foam core. That ensures the combination of light weight with high stiffness and strength, especially in bending, so essential for an application such as this. The body of the control console also has a sandwich construction with a foam core and fibre-reinforced plastic skins. However, here the reinforcement is glass fibres, as its mechanical demands are lower than for the hull. Lifeboats like this must be able to robustly resist capsizing and sinking whatever load is applied to them in rescue operations. They are therefore all fitted with a sponson: an external feature attached to the hull that resists capsizing. Here it takes the form of a buoyancy tube wrapped around the top of the hull, containing within it ten inflated airtight compartments. The material of construction is a woven fabric of polymeric fibres, coated in a flexible rubbery polymer.