ABSTRACT
This paper presents a buckling and failure analysis of a cylindrical wave energy converter composite buoy. This preliminary study considers a point absorber buoy, made of a glass-fibre reinforced polymer, under hydrostatic lateral pressure. The structure is analysed for the case of simply supported boundary conditions at ends of the structure and in case of cantilever boundary conditions. The buckling analysis is carried out through a finite element analysis and a comparison with an analytical formulation is presented. In addition, the failure of the composite structure is analysed with Tsai-Wu failure criterion. According to the results, the design pressure is determined by the composite failure criterion in both boundary conditions.
