Experimental testing of moorings for large floating wave energy converters

This paper presents the outcome of a test campaign, which investigates the behaviour of a synthetic mooring system applied to the Floating Power Plant wave energy converter. The study investigates the motion and tension response under operational and extreme sea states expected at the deployment site and studies the influence of variations of mass moment of inertia and mooring line stiffness. A simple quasi-static analysis based on existing guidelines was performed in order to compare results and validate the method. In most cases, the calculations proved to underestimate the tensions if compared to the measured tensions.