Abstract: To reduce the cost of the mooring system for the floating Oscillating Water Column (OWC) wave energy converter arrays and meanwhile to give considerations to the energy capture performance and the safety under extreme sea conditions, the comprehensive performance of a three-device shared mooring array is investigated by taking a floating cylindrical OWC device as the object. Firstly, a frequency-domain hydrodynamic model is established using AQWA and Fluent is used to identify the PTO damping and the viscous damping, and then the corrected damping parameters are introduced into the OrcaFlex equivalent OWC model. Subsequently, the results from the physical model tests are compared with those from the numerical simulations in order to verify the accuracy of the corrected equivalent model in describing the motion response and energy-capture performance of the floating OWC devices. On the basis of these, an independent mooring array and a three-device shared mooring array are constructed and compared in terms of motion response, mooring tension, energy-capture performance and economical efficiency. The results show that under the operating sea conditions, the average output power P_\textarr of the center-node shared mooring array (Array-3C) reaches to 95.86 kW, whereas that of the independent mooring array (Array-3A) is 88.16 kW, with the former being 8.73% higher than the later. The number of anchor points reduces from 9 in Array 3A to 6 in Array 3C and the total length of the mooring line reduces from 909 m down to 567 m. In addition, the annual energy production E_\textarr of Array-3C reaches 839733 kWh, being higher than that of Array-3A (772306 kWh). From the aspects of motion stability, energy capture performance, economical efficiency and the safety under extreme sea conditions, it can be seen that the Array-3C demonstrates superior over-all properties, indicating that rational design of shared mooring configurations can help enhancing the engineering application potential of floating OWC arrays.