Comparison of methods for estimating short-term extreme response of wave energy converters

Short-term extreme response statistics are often required to obtain the long-term (deployment life) response for an offshore structure. A number of methods are available to produce these response statistics for data collected from either physical experimentation or numerical modeling. Here, we consider the application of a series of such methods to determine the short-term extreme response statistics for a simple wave energy converter (WEC). Using data created from a frequency-domain model, each method is implemented multiple times to provide an understanding of its accuracy and variance. The results are compared along with an empirical “truth” result that uses all of the available data. Trade-offs between the amount of data required by a given method and its accuracy are presented and discussed.