Boundary element methods in action: A performance assessment for ocean engineering applications

• Assessment and comparison of seven hydrodynamic boundary element method solvers. • The benchmark test-cases were selected to represent marine devices. • The results show significant variations in the quality and the computational resources. • Provides insights to help users make informed choices between different solvers. • Calculations and results are fully available to the scientific community (Zenodo). Boundary Element Method (BEM) solvers play a key role in industrial-level marine device research. Despite relying on simplified hydrodynamic models, their computational efficiency and well-established validation has resulted in the widespread adoption of these software tools. These solvers have been created by different authors who, in some instances, have used different approaches to achieve the same objectives, which can lead to unexpected discrepancies in results obtained from different solvers. Some of these differences may not be apparent to the general user. To support an informed selection of software, this work presents a comprehensive review of several widely-used solvers. Their performance was assessed across diverse marine devices using specific metrics, enabling a thorough comparison of key parameters. It has been observed that the most accurate results are obtained by WAMIT and ORCAWAVE, closely followed by HAMS and CAPYTAINE. On the other hand, the most computationally efficient solvers are WAMIT, NEMOH and AQWA, followed by HAMS. As this study is open to the scientific community, all comparative models and pre- and post-processing routines have been shared openly to facilitate the reproducibility of the results, and future iterations of the study, as new versions of the compared software are released.