Extreme loading and fatigue analysis of a wave energy device

Sammanfattning: Wave energy is one of the possible solutions for meeting the future energy demand in a clean and sustainable way. Extracting large amounts of energy, a wave energy device would be subjected to extreme and fatigue loads from the waves. Designing such a device, a trade off needs to be done between making a device that is strong enough to withstand the loads and on the same time not too heavy making it inefficient and too costly. Having good estimations of extreme and fatigue loads are therefore critical when designing an efficient wave energy device. This thesis has aimed to create a tool that can be used between the already existing hydrodynamic and solid mechanic models available at CorPower Oceean. The goal has been that the tool shall extract the extreme and fatigue loads from the hydrodynamic model and format them in a way so that they can be used in the solid mechanical model. Four different tools have been created and compared for calculating fatigue using amplitude and spectral methods, where the amplitude methods also are able to estimate extreme loads. The fatigue tools have been evaluated against each other in a simple example showing that the estimated accumulated fatigue damage can be decreased by using several variables. An application of the tools has been done on a critical sub system of the wave energy device developed by CorPower Ocean. Where in this application critical points against extreme loading and fatigue have been localized. A new design has been suggested based on the strength analysis from the first one. Increasing the number of variables and using the tools developed in this thesis can significantly improve the fatigue damage estimations of the system. What fatigue method to use depends on the details for each case.