Mooring forces in a floating point-absorbing WEC system–a comparison between full-scale measurements and numerical simulations
Journal
Ships and Offshore Structures
Journal Volume
15
Journal Issue
S1
Pages
S70-S81
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
Abstract
The study presents an investigation of Waves4Power’s WaveEL 3.0 wave energy converter (WEC). It was used as a reference for full-scale measurements of the mooring forces and buoy motions in a measurement campaign 2017 at an installation location off the coast of Runde in Norway. A numerical simulation model of the installation was developed in the DNV GL software SESAM. Unfortunately, the sea state conditions were not measured during the measurement campaign. Hence, a methodology was developed that used the recorded motion data to compute the sea state conditions at the test site. The simulated WEC motions based on the computed sea states agreed very well with the measured WEC motions. The measured and simulated mooring forces were compared under various environmental conditions. 3-hour sea state realizations are typically preferred in numerical simulations. However, influences from the tide at the test site showed that sea states were normally stationary for only 1–2 h. The measured and simulated average mooring forces agreed very well during 1-hour periods, whereas the simulations overestimated the mooring forces in 3-hour periods because of the tide. ? 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Subjects
Full-scale measurement
mooring force
numerical simulation
wave energy converter
Computer simulation
Computer software
Digital arithmetic
Mooring
Numerical models
Ocean currents
Environmental conditions
Floating points
Full scale measurements
Installation locations
Measurement campaign
Mooring force
Motion data
Wave energy converters
Wave energy conversion
Type
journal article