Maritime Industry
The maritime industry plays a crucial role, especially in the energy and trade sectors. Optimized designs of ports, terminals, jetties, shipyards and other marine structures significantly improve performance and reduces investment costs of projects. Considering time and cost constraints, rough and challenging hydraulic conditions and environmental impacts associated with these complex projects, expert knowledge and innovative solutions are required to enable optimum design.
Ports and Waterway Design
Port entrances often demand breakwaters for ensuring a calm wave climate in the port and reducing siltation of the port basin and its access channel. The layout scheme of a port breakwater and access channel is an important balance between dredging costs, breakwater construction costs, nautical aspects and wave disturbance inside the port. For new port development, the location selection is also important as this depends on natural sheltering, vicinity to both current infrastructure and required hinterland.
Main components for port design studies are:
• Ambient and extreme wave conditions for design conditions and downtime assessments
• Hydraulic stability of the structures armouring, in particular at the roundheads
• Navigational and nautical aspects for incoming and departing vessels
• Wave penetration pattern behind the breakwater and inside the port area to assess wave disturbance and ship mooring under different circumstances
• Construction methodologies and building materials of breakwaters
Breakwater Design
In general, breakwater structures bear high investment costs in port development projects and significantly influence the correct functioning of the port. The breakwater design, layout and cross-sectional design are therefore critical in maritime projects. This requires a broad experience and expertise in port and breakwater design, as well as wave disturbance, nautical aspects and environmental impacts. CDR offers this expertise and required knowledge by our experienced in-house staff and highly specialized partners.