Assessment of Current State of Mooring Design in the Danish Wave Energy Sector

The mooring system is a vital part of any floating wave energy converter, both in terms of ensuring station keeping but also as it constitutes a significant share of the total cost. Motivatedby the considerable amount of failures due to insufficient mooring and the cost of mooring today, the present study outlines the design procedure recommended by design standards and provides considerations on choice of tools for analysis. This is compared to the procedure used by four wave energy converter developers, to illustrate the state of their current mooring design. The study shows a clear tendency amongst the developers of using existing offshore tradition and some inconsistency in chosen design procedures and parameters, by means of varying analysis types, environmental conditions and level of details. The lack of details in the design means that for all the investigated developers, despite having an overall solution, no final design has been achieved yet and further investigation is needed.