Mooring research to support marine energy development

Major design differences need to be considered while mooring a floating wave energy converter (WEC) as opposed to a conventionally moored vessel to support marine energy development. The research team at the Heriot-Watt University, a part of the SUPERGEN Marine Consortium program, assessed the dynamic properties of mooring lines with the aim of providing guidelines to designers of WEC. A relatively new application for a mooring system is its use in the deployment of marine energy converters (MEC) that are designed to extract energy from the waves. The university is conducting sea tests to provide controlled experiments that will attempt to quantify the differences between cleaned and fouled chains. These controlled experiments will provide a basic understanding of the effect of the mooring system to the response characteristics of a device. The results of these experiments will be used to confirm and develop numerical codes with applications for MECs.