Abstract
International standards for the design and certification of marine energy systems, including wave and current energy converters, are essential for the commercialization of these technologies, but their compliance requires significant effort and resources by project developers; e.g., finding the appropriate met-ocean datasets, processing and analysing this data to estimate the design load conditions and device response. Methods for calculating these statistics can be complex and results are rarely consistent. Herein we present efforts to address these challenges by demonstrating key functions for a web-based tool, the “Design Load Case (DLC) Generator.” This tool integrates a host of data search, processing and statistical tools to streamline the characterization of design load conditions and to determine the design load requirements as specified in the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 62600-2 design standard. Test cases include design of the Reference Model 3 (RM3) point absorber at two US West Coast locations. These two sites allow comparison of environmental load using in-situ buoy observations and model wave hindcasts, and different methods for characterizing extreme wave loads (univariate and bivariate). These test cases highlight some of the challenges determining design load requirements and the benefits of facilitating a complex workflow within a single web-based platform that leverages a diverse set of data processing and statistical tools.