Coastal areas face increasing threat from erosion. The use of coastal protection structures is imperative to counter this. Concrete “armouring” is widely used due to durability and cost-effectiveness. Conventional methods of “armouring” result in habitat degradation and loss of biodiversity. ECOncrete developed Coastalock, an armour unit designed to provide coastal protection but also to create marine habitats.

Initial tests conducted on impermeable slopes in deep water conditions revealed, that tightly placed units experienced pressure gradients across the top layer, leading to failure. The aim of this study is to investigate the hydraulic performance of Coastalock, both with and without modification, within permeable breakwater structures. The study examines the influence of toe berms on different surfaces, assessing the armour layer’s susceptibility to sliding.

The research aims to bridge existing knowledge gaps regarding Coastalock behavior under varying wave conditions through literature review and physical model tests conducted in the 2D wave flume at TU Delft.

Structure from motion photogrammetry enabled the creation of 3D models of the armour layer after wave attack, facilitating the tracking of armour layer deformation of selected test series. The research includes measurements of overtopping discharge and reflection coefficient.

The findings shed light on failure mechanisms observed in Coastalock armour layers on permeable core slopes, attributed to built-up pressures exceeding self-weight and interlocking capabilities during wave run-down. 'Breathing' involves upward movement perpendicular to the slope during wave run-down and downward movement during wave run-up. Friction and partial interlocking contribute to the formation of a bulge in the armour layer, growing in size and magnitude, leading to extraction.

Observing increased 'breathing' and extraction thresholds with larger inter-unit void sizes, was confirmed for permeable cores. No stability increase compared to impermeable core was found, attributed to reduced maximum run-down levels. A lowering of overtopping and reflection was found for the permeable core.

The protrusions implementation necessitated a new configuration, termed the 'Protrusion Optimized' configuration, with an orientation change from cavity upwards to downwards at SWL. 10% protrusions reduced the stability number threshold for 'breathing', while 22.5% protrusions prevented filter layer migration and reached up 𝑁𝑠=4.2 without 'breathing' or extraction. A stability increase was found in 𝑠0𝑝=0.02 conditions, attributed to the ‘reservoir effect’. Incorporating protrusions and transitioning to the 'Protrusion Optimized' configuration increased reflection due to increased surface area and reduced permeability.

Changing the orientation location towards the midpoint between SWL and the bottom row or facing all units upwards resulted in increased stability in terms of ‘breathing’ and extraction, as well as a downslope shift of the damage location. Upwards-oriented units led to smoother slopes and higher reflection coefficients, both attributed to the water retaining properties of the cavity.

The presence of toe berms, showed no significant impact on damage progression or the location. Downslope movement well below the threshold indicative of near extraction was observed.

Recommendations for advancing 22.5% protrusions are proposed, advocating a Ns=2.6 for surging waves in deep water conditions. This design offers notable overtopping reduction, orientation flexibility, and reduced concrete usage and project duration.

Geotextiles are widely used in civil engineering, particularly in hydraulic engineering where they serve as filters and protect sand and clay from erosion. Their primary function is to prevent the washout of fine materials from the subsoil. Geotextiles are permeable fabrics and are usually made from plastics like polypropylene and polyethylene. However, due to environmental concerns surrounding synthetic geotextiles, there is a growing interest in moving away from plastics towards natural fibers. To facilitate this transition, understanding the engineering properties of these materials is essential. This study focuses on sandtightness, aiming to make applications more feasible.

Geotextiles can reduce the total thickness of a granular filter and thereby the costs. Because a geotextile can replace multiple granular filter layers, less material is required, which also results in lower emissions. Filters can be distinguished into two categories: geometrically open and geometrically closed filters. Sand particles cannot pass through a geometrically closed filter. The sandtightness is independent of the magnitude of the hydraulic load. Open filters prevent the erosion of the base material up to a certain hydraulic load. Open geotextile filters are not common used in hydraulic engineering.

Previous research has primarily focused on synthetic geotextiles, developing formulas to predict critical filter velocities based on their properties ((Van Der Knaap et al., 1986) and ( (Klein Breteler, 1988)). In contrast to these synthetic-focused studies, a study by Lemmens in 1996 on natural geotextiles, such as jute cloth, revealed a critical hydraulic gradient of 0.26, suggesting jute's potential as an alternative to synthetic materials. Despite these findings, stability criteria for natural geotextiles remain undefined, and newly developed geotextiles from natural materials have not yet been tested.
To address this gap, experiments were conducted in a flume set-up at the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory at TU Delft, using both woven and non-woven geotextiles made from natural materials such as jute, hemp, and wool. In the flow flume, a steady current was applied to a one meter long stretch of rock, closed at the top, with a geotextile-covered sand bed beneath it, allowing hydraulic gradients up to i = 1 to be exerted. This set-up enabled the determination of the critical load.

A total of 19 tests were conducted with 11 different configurations, involving variations with 7 different types of geotextile (4 woven jute geotextiles and 3 non-woven geotextiles made of hemp, jute, and wool). During all test steps of the 19 tests in the flow flume, measurements of water levels, pressures, and discharge were taken. Two endoscopes were installed at different locations in the filter layer, with holes drilled into two stones to secure the endoscopes. This allowed the camera to be positioned at the top of a pore, providing a view of the geotextile and detecting passing sand grains.

To determine the critical test step where the movement of base material begins, an innovative method of analyzing the erosion state was employed using endoscope images. These endoscopes are capable of detecting sand grains, allowing for the observation of erosion dynamics. In 4 of the 19 tests, the eroded sand was also suctioned after each test step to gain insight into the amount sediment transport. This indicates that even before the critical threshold level, there are small amounts of erosion immediately after increasing the hydraulic load. If the critical threshold level has not yet been reached, this erosion will return to zero during the rest of the test step. When determining the critical test step, two values were used for the critical load: a non-erosion criterion (Ho, 2007) and a criterion of 0.2 gr/s/m² (Klein Breteler, 1988), as used in previous studies to determine the start of movement. The non-erosion criterion is qualitative, whereas the Klein Breteler criterion is quantitative. It was found that these criteria are not equivalent, with a factor of 2 to 3 difference in the critical filter velocity.

This study concluded that the critical load for sediment transport is primarily determined by the filter velocity for open natural geotextiles. This contradicts previous studies that suggest a critical hydraulic gradient for open natural geotextiles. The critical filter velocity is influenced by the geotextile's characteristics, including thickness, opening size, and water permeability. Notably, the structure of the geotextile itself significantly affects the critical filter velocity. In this study, two woven jute geotextiles (J4: 422 gr/m² and O90 = 516.1 μm, J5: 518 gr/m² and O90 = 819.0 μm) with different structures were tested. The difference in opening size between the two geotextiles is approximately a factor of 1.5. However, the geotextile with much larger openings had a 1.75 times greater critical filter velocity with a start of movement criterion of 0.2 gr/s/m². Additionally, while the grading and size of the filter layer's grains influenced the critical hydraulic gradient, they had little to no effect on the critical filter velocity, emphasizing the significance of geotextile properties in determining their performance and stability under hydraulic load.

Ultimately, based on the tests, it can be concluded that the newly developed non-wovens could be a good alternative to synthetic geotextiles when considering sandtightness under parallel flow. All three non-wovens are reasonably stable at a hydraulic gradient of i ≈ 1, which is the maximum gradient that could be applied in our test set-up.

Recommendations for future research include testing with coarser sand, longer test durations, and synthetic counterparts for comparative analysis. Suggested improvements to the test set-up involve detailed height measurements of the sand bed and filter layer, and using high-resolution cameras for better sediment tracking. This sediment tracking by an endoscope can be improved by using a fixed pore for the endoscope for all tests. This can ensure that the pore volume is consistent across all tests and the size of the geotextile section captured in the image is also consistent. There is potential to use endoscope images for quantitative analysis of sediment transport. Further, the study emphasizes examining different flow conditions (perpendicular, and non-stationary) to enhance geotextile designs, particularly in dynamic environments like coastal revetments.

Wave transmission at low-crested coastal structures has been studied, based on physical model tests with trapezoidal impermeable, permeable and perforated structures. The differences between wave transmission at impermeable and permeable structures are relatively limited. For a perforated hollow structure with an impermeable vertical screen in the middle, the wave transmission is significantly less than for perforated structures without an impermeable vertical screen; the blocking of the orbital motion by the screen significantly reduces wave transmission. The effectiveness of an impermeable vertical screen to block the orbital motion and consequently reduce wave transmission assists designers of artificial reefs to design structures that reduce wave transmission. Empirical expressions based on a hyperbolic tangent function have been derived to describe the test results. For permeable structures also available data for emerged structures has been used in the analysis, and the newly introduced expression appears to be accurate for both submerged and emerged permeable structures.

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ECOncrete®‘s Coastalock is an ecologically designed armour unit, providing an alternative and/or a complement to traditional armour layers with ecologically enhanced armouring that provides shoreline stabilization, while also creating well-defined local ecosystems that mimic natural rock pools. The 2D physical model tests performed at TU Delft focused on the stability, reflection and overtopping of a slope with regularly placed single layer Coastalock armour. The 2V:3H slope had an impermeable core, no wave breaking on the foreshore and no rock toe. The stability was seen to double, with stability number Ns (Ns= Hs/ΔDn50) increasing from roughly 2 to 4 and above, by increasing the porosity between the blocks from spacing the units from 0percent to 25percent. So less concrete use led to more stability. The mean overtopping discharge could be characterized by a roughness factor of gamma_f = 0.610 (for 25percent spacing). A key goal of the Coastalock development is to demonstrate that with the use of innovative eco-engineered armour unit design it is now possible to add ecological considerations into the design process to promote biodiversity and provide ecosystem services, achieving both structural and ecological goals.@en

In this research, the influence of the permeability and the porosity of artificial reefs on wave transmission and the sheltered habitat of marine life is investigated. A physical model is used to find the answer to this question.
The main finding of this research is that a hollow, perforated structure can act both as an artificial reef that provides a safe habitat for marine life, and as a breakwater that provides sufficient coastal protection. Moreover, a new empirical relation was derived for a smooth impermeable breakwater, rubble mound breakwater, and a hollow perforated breakwater with an impermeable screen inside.

The objective of this master thesis is to investigate experimentally how non-breaking wave loading affects the stability of the MOSES artificial reefs, an artificial reef by the company ReefSystems. Small scale wave flume tests with a length scale factor of 20 were conducted in the Scheldt flume at Deltares in Delft to determine the stability of three physical reef models with varying characteristics under multiple wave loading conditions. Based on this, a prediction of the stability of the reef prototype was investigated.

The experimental tests’ conditions were based on varying parameters (the relative wave height, wave steepness, and water depth) to obtain the broadest possible range of conditions. Variations in regular or irregular waves, with or without foreshore, water depth, wave height, and period were used for the tests. For each experimental wave flume test, it was established whether the reef was stable. The observed stability of the reef was related to the conditions during that test, determined by the resistance-type wave gauges that recorded the height of the free surface.

Based on the data of the experimental flume test, a stability function was determined, giving the influence of three non-dimensional parameters (the relative wave height, the wave steepness, and the relative water depth) on the stability of that reef. The tests were also compared to two stability prediction methods; the Morison method and a prediction method based on the mobility parameter.