Mooring Influence on the Productivity of a Pitching Wave Energy Converter

The paper aims at investigate the effect of the mooring system on Wave Energy Converter productivity. In this case a pitch resonant device has been considered for the analysis. The non-linearities of the mooring system require generally a computational effort which cannot be considered in the early design stages of a WEC, and seldom the mooring systems are totally included in WEC models. Driven by those considerations, a nonlinear mooring solvers, MoorDyn, has been used to carry out the effect of the mooring system on energy production. As first step a mooring model has been built to take familiarity with the solver and it has been validated against experimental data, through a static pull-out test and with irregular wave. Then, a semi-taut mooring model has been included in the hydrodynamic model.