Abstract
To promote and support the wave energy industry, a wave energy converter (WEC) design tool, WEC-Sim, is being developed by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In this paper, the WEC-Sim code is used to model a point absorber WEC designed by the U.S. Department of Energy's reference model project. Preliminary verification was performed by comparing results of the WEC-Sim simulation through a code-to-code comparison, utilizing the commercial codes ANSYS-AQWA, WaveDyn, and OrcaFlex. A preliminary validation of the code was also performed by comparing WEC-Sim simulation results to experimental wave tank tests.