New mooring design allows deepwater floating breakwaters

A mooring system that makes floating breakwaters possible in deepwater harbors has been designed by Tokuo Yamamoto at Oregon State University (OSU) as a by‐product of his fundamental investigations of the interaction of waves and floating objects. Yamamoto found that the waveweakening ability of circular floating breakwaters is almost independent of the type of mooring and that round breakwaters are consistently effective for smaller waves. However, his research has shown that the waveweakening capability of rectangular or elliptical breakwaters is strongly dependent on the type of mooring.