The city of Rotterdam and its port have been constantly growing over the last decades. As the port is ensuring a place in the top ten ports in the world, the city of Rotterdam is changing as well, growing and becoming a more international town. The municipality of Rotterdam is planning to build a 3rd bridge that will cross the Nieuwe waterweg and will connect the eastern or western part of the city center to improve the economic growth, welfare and attainability of the city. Although the exact location of the bridge is still under investigation, the construction of the bridge will obstruct the passage of cruise ships and consequently, they will not be able to reach Kop van Zuid where the current cruise terminal is located.
Moreover, new buildings will be constructed in the coming years at Kop van Zuid. The construction of these buildings will lead to more logistics problems at the current terminal that will influence the viability of the entire area. Currently, the port of Rotterdam is facing an increase of entrance demand of cruise ships. The number of double mooring calls and the dimensions of the cruise ships are expected to grow in the coming years. The current cruise terminal cannot, without technical improvements, guarantee enough berthing space for two cruise ships at the same time.
For these reasons, in 2015 the Port of Rotterdam Authority started the project “Zeecruise lange termijn visie”. One of the conclusions of the “Zeecruise lange termijn visie” project in case that the Port of Rotterdam Authority and the municipality of Rotterdam decide to change the location of the cruise terminal, was that the most suitable location for the future cruise terminal is Pier 1 of the Merwehaven. The Merwehaven is composed of four piers that were constructed between 1923 and 1931 using caissons as quay walls.
Due to the age of the construction of the caissons and the requirements imposed by the new cruise terminal, a full feasibility study of the Merrwehaven had to be performed. The feasibility study is described in this report and mainly concerns the adaptation of the existing quay wall of Pier 1. The aim of this study was to maintain the existing caissons, avoiding the demolition of the structure and the need for constructing a completely new quay wall.
The approach used to achieve this objective follows the principles of the basic design cycle of Roozenburg and Eekels. Different design phases distinguish this method and the structure of this report follows these phases.
In the first phase, the functions, operational aspects, boundary conditions and assumptions of the Merwehaven and cruise market were analyzed. Based on this analysis the quay walls of Pier 1 were assessed. The main scope of the assessment was to establish whether the quay walls meet the requirements for the new cruise terminal and to identify the main issues that hinder the mooring of the cruise ships. The assessment proved that the quay walls do not meet the requirements of the new cruise terminal. Therefore, the conclusion was that to maintain the existing caissons of Pier 1 and ensure their stability a technical design solution must be provided.
Different design concepts were proposed to solve the issues that hinder the mooring of the cruise ships along the caissons. Through a first design loop, the design concepts that did not have sufficient feasibility to become the final solution were excluded. From the remaining design variants the best design variant was selected, by means of an evaluation based on a Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) and a cost estimation. From this evaluation, it turned out that the best technical design solution is to drive an underwater sheet pile wall in front of the caissons of Pier 1.
Then, before performing the detailed design of the best design variant, special attention was given to the design bollard capacity of the cruise terminal. The bollard force is an important load in the design of quay walls. Hence, an extended study concerning the loads acting on the design cruise ship was carried out to define the required bollard capacity of the new cruise terminal. From this study, it turned out that the wind force is the dominant load acting on the design cruise ship and that the effect of passing vessels can be neglected. Based on this conclusion a static mooring analysis was performed to determine the load on the mooring lines of the design cruise ship and consequently the required bollard capacity. On the basis of the results of this analysis, the conclusion was that the existing bollards located on top of the caissons cannot withstand the mooring force and therefore new bollards with a capacity of 1700 kN have to be provided.
In the last phase, the design variant with underwater sheet pile wall was elaborated in more detail. This detailed design was performed by analyzing the overall stability of the caisson and the deformation of the underwater sheet pile wall using the PLAXIS software. Based on these analyses the conclusion was that the design variant with the underwater sheet pile wall can adapt the existing caisson, used as quay wall at Pier 1 in the Merwehaven for the future cruise terminal of Rotterdam.