H.J. Verhagen
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15 records found
1
Innovative coastal risk reduction through hybrid design
Combining sand cover and structural defenses
In this paper, protection options for a high-value, industrial area along the coast of West Bengal (India) are investigated. The options are designed to protect against cyclone surges with a probability of 1/100 per year. Two alternatives are compared, a classical solution of a dike with a revetment and a solution with a mangrove belt in front of the dike. The results reveal that from a pure infrastructural cash-flow point-of-view, the mangrove solution is at least 25% cheaper than the classical solution with a rock revetment. An important finding is that this conclusion does not need the financial evaluation of the obvious additional ecological advantages that mangroves offer. It is postulated that these results are generally valid for high-value coastal areas under the attack of waves during storm surges.
Single layer concrete armor systems are being widely used nowadays in the design of rubble mound breakwaters. Recently, a new concrete armor unit has been developed and applied as single layer armor system in the repair works of one damaged breakwater at Al Fujeirah, UAE. It has a symmetrical shape, in contrast to most other units. Modern single layer concrete armor units that exist at this moment have design guidelines in terms of placement, stability and overtopping. However, because of lack of laboratory research and the little experience of using Crablock, no design guidance exists yet for this new single layer block compared to other existing one layer units. Being a new armor unit, the placement was investigated first. Then physical model tests were performed in a wave flume to come up with results on stability and wave overtopping. Furthermore, to determine the interlocking properties of armor units, pull tests were also conducted in this research. The placement tests showed that uniform placement was best achieved with a rectangular grid on a relatively small underlayer of rock. Test results on stability showed that longer waves affected the armor layer a little more, with more rocking and earlier start of damage. Packing density as well as placement pattern showed no influence on wave overtopping. The overtopping tests gave larger overtopping than expected, which might be due to the fairly steep 1:30 foreshore that gave a large ratio of significant wave-height from the time domain and the spectral wave-height.
Accidental use of earth bodies as flood defence
The Vlaardingen case study
The strength of the grass sod is an important factor for the stability of a dike in the Netherlands during wave overtopping conditions. Many tests have been performed the last few years with the Wave Overtopping Simulator, leading to the Cumulative Overload Method and a critical velocity. This velocity is a strength parameter of grass on a dike under loads induced by overtopping wave volumes. A new method has been developed to determine this critical velocity, by measuring the force while lifting the grass sod perpendicular to the slope out of the sod. This force is rewritten into the critical grass normal stress which is one of the input parameters for determining the critical velocity of a grass sod. When the critical velocity resulting from this method is compared with the determined critical velocities with the Wave Overtopping Simulator, there is good correspondence between the results for the tested locations. Therefore the sod pulling test could provide results that are reliable enough to determine the critical velocity of a dike section.