M. Baijens

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Master thesis (1)

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Assessment of Maintenance Strategies for the Next Generation Meuse Weirs

Master thesis (2022) - A. Haile , S.N. Jonkman , W.F. Molenaar , M. van den Boomen , M. Baijens

The Meuse is a river in West-Europe which rises at the Langres Plateau and flows from France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The river has always been an important shipping route, even though its navigability has been problematic in the Netherlands. To solve this problem seven weirs were constructed in the Dutch part of the Meuse. They are located at Borgharen, Linne, Roermond, Belfeld, Sambeek, Grave and Lith. Weirs are hydraulic structures and mainly control the upstream water level to allow for sufficient depth for shipping. Structures such as weirs generally have a technical life span of 100 years, and because the Meuse weirs were built 100 years ago they are up for replacement. Rijkswaterstaat wishes to have uniformity in the designs of the next Meuse weirs. This decreases the amount of unique components which in turn leads to the reduction of repair and maintenance costs.

The main objective of this thesis is to determine the most cost-efficient maintenance strategy for the next generation Meuse weirs. Part of the objective of this study is also to determine the influence of ship collisions on the availability and costs of weirs. In this thesis a case study is used to set up the analysis. The case study consists of two weir alternatives that were proposed as the replacement for the weir in Grave.

Based on the results for both the availability and costs of both maintenance strategies in this report it seems that the preventive maintenance strategy performs better than the corrective maintenance strategy for both weir alternatives. The availability under preventive maintenance is higher and the total costs (maintenance costs and repair costs) are lower under preventive maintenance. The availability of the weirs are mostly influenced by the failure mechanism of ship collision and the weir component “hydraulic aggregates”. The largest contributor to the maintenance costs are the hydraulic cylinders and for the repair costs the most significant contributor are the hydraulic aggregates. Ship collisions seem to influence the availability greatly, but has limited influence on the repair costs of the weirs.