Floating wave energy converters are surface based thus facilitating installation and maintenance. They tend to be moored offshore and consequently have less of an impact than other devices both visually and audibly. Mooring these devices is a challenging task, as not only are they subject to drift forces due to the aggressive environment, but they are also designed to operate at their resonant frequency in order to obtain as much power as possible. Such operational parameters require heavy duty mooring systems, capable of coping with the dynamic environment. These moorings will, in turn, affect the performance of the device by restraining the motions and thus modifying the energy absorption characteristics. In this paper a free floating representation of the Offshore Wave Energy Ltd. device (OWEL) has been modeled in RANS CFD in order to obtain initial mooring loads. Subsequently, a preliminary mooring arrangement for OWEL was developed, and using these loads it was modeled using OrcaFlex. The dynamic, non-linear loads were then coupled to a fully transient, multiphase CFD analysis of the device in order to obtain performance characteristics for further detailed design. The numerical results have been compared to results obtained through physical model scale tests of the device and show a good degree of correlation.

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