Coastal Processes and Sediment Transport - Webinar

Share this tool with your friends!

  
Use Ctrl + F to search the transcript.
Copy transcriptRemove [*]
hello everyone and thank you for joining this webinar on coastal processes
and sediment transport my name is Melvin revoir I'm a coastal engineer at
DHI Australia and today I'm gonna give you some background on coastal
processes that are important for sediment transport flow and sediment
transport in the in the coastal zone are very important in relation to several
engineering topics such as sedimentation erosion around structures back
feeling of dredge channel changes in the near shore morphology and
longshore and crush or transport so what we're going to do today is look at
coastal processes that are important for sediment transport and then detail
longshore and croushore sediment transport and in the end we will look at
how the human project can have interaction with with a shoreline evolution
here is an overview of different activities and different processes that are
occurring on the coast we can see that there are natural processes such as
waves and currents and rivers supplying sediments in the coast there are
also human activities like agriculture and industrial development and they
are also tonne and industries we know that nowadays there is an increased
pressure on the coast more and more people want to live close to the coast
done more and more and more Abbot ation on the coast there are also
larger harbours due to larger ship traffic so all this leads to him to an
increased pressure on the coast and Shores are are active due to the impact
of waves and currents and storms on the geology and as we will see later
the coastal landscapes are also impacted by the by the elements which may
cause conflicts with within nature it is important to keep in mind that all
these coastal impacts are very often interrelated and to understand all
these processes we we are lucky because today we have a better
understanding of the of the physical processes themselves we also have
access to much more field measurements and we also have numerical
models that are enable to to help us predicting the shoreline evolution so
what are we up against on the coast well basically there are very strong
natural forces that are that are hitting the coasts such as waves and
currents and usually the shoreline will respond with an active morphology
as a consequence of this we have typical problems such as coastal flooding
and coastal erosion that can be very problematic when there are activities
or people that are located on the coast so what causes changes to the
coastlines well first it's important to keep in mind that the coastlines have
an historical evolution even without the intervention of humans generally
we can say that the appearance of of the beaches is determined by the
hydrographic conditions of the site and the geology of the site any
interference will cause reaction in the form of shoreline response and this
response can be more less pronounced and more less quick therefore it's
important to understand the physical processes that are responsible for this
evolution in order to successfully plan the design and the developments of
the near shore zone in the end all this is related to sediment transport
waves and currents are the driving forces for sediment transport we often
distinguish two types of sediment transport the long shore sediment
transport which runs parallel to the shoreline and the cross shore sediment
transport which run which is perpendicular to the to the shoreline the
understanding of the coastal processes makes possible two to describe and
quantify the sediment transport quantities and therefore the quantify the
impacts of different developments and also develop solutions to to avoid
serious problems along the coast this is a schematic way of showing what
we are going to look at today and and it shows the different components
of sediment transport so we have currents and waves which are the forcing
and all these together will lead to the estimation of sediment transport
quantities and depending on the sediment transport quantities we will have
a potential morphological change this morphological change will have a
direct impact on the on the forcing itself which will be different from the
previous statement first let's have a look at the waves waves are very
central when we're dealing with sediment transport and here you can see
for instance an example of a wave field and the interaction with with a
coastal structure it can be very difficult to describe so let's have a look at
the different processes that can affect the waves typically we distinguish
different types of waves based on the on their period we first have the wind
waves that are generated by a local win and which have a period of let's say
below 8 seconds another main type of wave is the swell waves which are
typically generated by distant wind and which have a period which is larger
than eight seconds and finally infra gravity waves which are long bound
waves released due to wave breaking in the near shore zone and these
waves have typically a period of minutes in the order of minutes so let's
have a look at the life cycle of a wave first the wind disturbs water surface
and that's how the waves are generated then the waves can can continue to
grow if the wind continues and then the waves can propagate with or
without the influence of the wind until the waves reach the shore where
they will dissipate and potentially break on the shore and also generate
infra gravity waves as we've seen before the waves are generated by the
wind in deeper water and then they will propagate towards the shore with a
certain speed and depending on the bathymetry or whether there are
structures on their way to the shore there will be affected for instance here
on this on this plot we can see that there is a breakwater which is located in
the middle of the coast and when the waves wave front will reach this
structure it can potentially be reflected by the structure which will conduct
conduct in having a wavefront in a different direction there is also
refraction occurring and shoaling and and breaking but we will have a look
at that in a bit more details now so let's have a look at the refraction
refraction is a change in direction of a wave due to the to the change of its
speed when it reaches a shallow area when the wave reaches a shallow area
the part of the wave front which is in the shadow area slows down whereas
the part of the wavefront which remains in the deep area keeps its its
original speed and this will typically lead to a bending of the wavefront now
another important process is diffraction diffraction occurs when when
waves encounter a surface piercing obstacle such as breakwater natural
headland or even around an island the diffraction is the spreading of wave
energy into areas which are sheltered by the structure the energy is
transferred laterally which leads to having waves even in the lien of the
structure usually wave heights are reduced as a wave as a wave energy is
distributed of a longer wavefront when propagate in the shadow area we've
seen that they they may change direction due to due to the bottom friction
another thing that that occur is the the wave slowdown and the kinetic
energy of the waves are transformed into potential energy and this leads to
a slower but higher wave this process is known as shoaling when the waves
gets higher and higher and slower and slower it continues until the waves
become unstable and and breaks so as we've seen there are a lot of
processes that can affect the way use and you know in order to be able to
work with the waves we would like to have a description of the ways that is
easy to handle and that is easy to analyze for instance statistically in order
to have a feeling of the wave conditions at a specific site for this we use a
typical wave parameters such as a significant wave height the mean wave
period or the peak wave period and the mean wave direction this scale
these parameters are usually calculated based on the on the wave energy
spectrum which describes the wave energy distribution on on different
wave frequencies and wave directions so this is an example of a multi
picked wave climate on the bottom right we will we can recognize Australia
where significant wave height is displayed and on the Left we can have a we
can have a look at the little zoom on the Brisbane area and in the bottom
left we have a representation of the wave energy spectra depending on the
direction and the frequency what we see here that when they are red colour
there is a peak of energy and we can see that at some specific times we
have peaks of energies coming from different directions it's important to
have in mind that that the integrated parameters are calculated for a
specific spectra but this spectra is not necessarily as as uniform as it can be
seen in the parameters so now we've looked at the wave let's have a look
and then at another important parameter for the for the sediment transport
which is coastal currents the currents can be divided into into ocean
currents and near shore currents but in our case it's only near shore
currents that have an influence on the coastal processes currents in the
coastal zone are typically forced by different components such as ocean
currents which are large-scale circulations due to density gradients in
temperature and salinity there is also the time that has a significant
importance for the for the currents atmospheric conditions will lead to two
current modifications as well and in the end the breaking waves that will
generate very strong currents which is very important for the for the
sediment transport so basically when when the wave break there is a
gradient in force that is induced on the coast and this gradient is reflected
in in a gradient in the radiation stresses if we look at the two different
components the cross flow components is balanced by a slope of the mean
water surface which is called the setup the second is the second component
which is parallel to the coast generates longshore current this currents can
be very strong and have significant importance when we're dealing with
sediment transport the waves also generate crosswalk currents we can
distinguish the currents that are directed towards the shore and the
currents that are directed towards offshore areas the Stokes drift is directed
towards the shore and it basically it represents the mean velocity of fluid
particle over wave period there is also the streaming in the wave boundary
layer that have that is directed toward the shore the wave boundary layer is
a is a sin layer close to the bed where velocities goes from from zero at the
bed to the outer flow wave induced velocity and the non-uniformity of the
wave boundary layer generates mean current which is directed in the wave
propagation direction and finally in the in the breaking zone there is also
the the mass transport which is due to the two breaking two breaking wave
rollers these onshore directed currents are balanced by offshore directed
current which is known as undertow and this undertow can be very strong
in the in the breaking zone and finally there are also currents that are due
to the non uniformity of the batma tree for instance rip currents which are
due to the to this country discontinuity in the in the bar when the waves are
breaking they generate wave setup we've since and we've seen that before
and this increases water level in shore of the bar wave breaking is lessons
intensive in the RIP channels due to the larger depth and and this leads to a
lower water level at this area so due to this difference in water level there is
an offshore directed flow which is driven out through the channels this
cause is very often accidents due to this it's very dangerous for for
swimmers for instance and and it's important to be very careful when there
is such a such a system along the coast so here is an example of a
simulated wave field and its associated wave driven currents field and what
we can see here is that the the batma tree is non-uniform and this has an
influence on the on the wave patterns for instance here in the in the red
circle there is focusing of the wave energy due to due to a shallow area and
this has an effect and effect on the on the wave driven currents where we
can see that the there is a there is an increased current another interesting
feature we can see on this figure is is the interaction between the coastal
structures and in the currents and we can see that on the left part of this
map that the two structures that are located along the coast has have an
influence on the on the currents and for instance it will it will generate very
strong ATS or direct the currents toward offshore areas so now we have
waves we have currents let's have a look at the basic concepts of sediment
transport here is a quick animation of of how the two sediments are
mobilized by waves and currents over wave period and we will have a look
at how we can calculate the sediment transport rates in the coastal zone we
usually deal with sand which is typically defined by grain size that are larger
than 0.065 millimeters and smaller than two millimeter we usually deal with
sense because the final grains are now very often washed away by the
waves and deposit in the more offshore and cam areas and waves also have
an impact on the on the larger sediments such as gravel and shingles which
can be pushed on the beach during storms as we can see on the on the
illustration the sand can have very can have different aspects and that's why
we very often have to deal with non-uniform sand and in order to describe
non uniform sand we need to have characteristics of the of the sand we're
working with one of the important cast characteristics is is a grain size
distribution here on you can see an example of grain distribution curve a
great distribution is typically determined by a sieve analysis which provides
a frequency curve so depending on the size of the sieve we can have a
certain percentage of the sand that is lower slower and this provides
important parameters for the sand such as median grain diameter and the
geometric standard deviation fall velocity is another very important
parameter which is the terminal velocity that is rich when the grain is
settling in the in the water and this fall velocity is dependent on several
parameters such as grain size or the shape of the grain itself for instance so
let's have a look at at how waves and currents generate sediment transport
we typically distinguish different types of transport the bedload transport
which is when the sediments are transported along the bed so the grains
have a more or less continuous contact with a bin with a bed this is related
to the mostly related to the bitching stress then there is a suspended load
transport which is when the sediments are transported in the water column
basically this happens when the when the waves tear up the sediment and
the longshore current transports the sediment this is more a result of the
agitation of the fluid turbulence and then the total sediment transport
which is which is sum of these two contributions we will look at the long
shore sediment transport which is parallel to the to the shore and the cross
shore sediment transport which is perpendicular to the shore line these two
components of sediment transport have different characteristics the
longshore transport is typically what determines changes to coastal
morphology on on the long term we're talking about years or decades it
also varies on shorter term due to season or year to year variations on the
other hand the cross shore transport is typically important for changes to
the coastal morphology which occur on a short scale this is particularly
relevant for storms and cyclones and single events but also seasons for
instance in location where we have a strong change from season to season
so how do we calculate the long shore sediment transport rates they are
relatively simple formulas for calculating the long shore transport one of
the most known formula is surg formulation this formula relates wave
energy flux at the point of breaking with with a littoral drift it's based on
the idea that the littoral drift is mainly driven by the wave driven currents
and not by tide or ocean currents it's important to to note that in this
formula and neither the coastal profile nor the sediment size enters the
formula for instance but still it's it it's able to provide a good estimate of
the longshore transport within an order of magnitude another way of
calculating the launch longshore sediment transport is the use of numerical
model to use this numerical model we typically define a coastal profile and
so the bottom 'try the roughness the grain size then we transform the
waves from near shore over the bathymetry based on these waves
transformation we can calculate the wave driven currents and based on this
way driven currents we can calculate the sediment transport this can be
done for any combination of wave parameter and water level which is very
useful when we are looking at at time series so let's have a look at a
concrete example of long shore sediment transport the longshore sediment
transport is heavily dependent on the on the direction of the waves here we
have an example of the coast which is exposed to different types of waves
as it's indicated on the wave rose you can see and depending on the waves
that are arriving to the coast we'll have a transport which will be oriented
towards north because of the waves coming from south east and toward
south and transport to ourselves because of the waves from the most
northern direction as it's indicated by the by the arrows we have a larger
transport towards the north than towards the south and this leads to the
notion of net sediment transport which is which is basic the sum of these
two contributions so here in this example will we can tell that the net
sediment transport is oriented toward nose because we have slightly more
transportable north and toward south that means that in average the sand
in this area is is moving or drifting towards north this is very important
when we are looking at coastal coastline developments as we are going to
see later another important notion is a gross sediment transport which
doesn't take into consideration the direction of the transport but is simply
the absolute some of the of the two contribution it is an estimation of the
total transport that occurs at a specific location there are some locations
where the net sediment transport is very close to zero but with very high
gross transport the gross sediment transport is very important when we are
facing problems such as back feeling of the navigations of the navigation
channels or the siltation in the in the harbours what we define as
equilibrium orientation is the beach orientation for which the annual net
transport is zero so when working on a coastal project we like to we like to
define what we call the Q alpha curve the Q Phi curve is a key element for
understanding the coastal processes at a site it it indicates how far we are
from the equilibrium orientation and it can also be used in order to to
assess the impact of coastal structure or even estimate a lifetime of of a
nourishment for instance when protecting the coast and this is an essential
part of coastal morphological studies let's now have a quick look at the
crush or sediment transport the crush or a sediment transport is important
as a coastal profile is formed by erosion and deposition associated with
with ashore normal transport and the profile is needed for the long shore
sediment transport as we've seen before so here is a summary of the
different contribution and we can find outside the braking zone so as we've
seen for the currents we have a streaming in the wave boundary layer
which will have a small contribution to the on shore transport then they are
there is also a contribution towards a show due to nonlinear wave so as the
waves are approaching the shoreline but before breaking they become
increasingly nonlinear causing a net sediment transport in the direction of
propagation as we are outside the braking zone the sediments are not
suspended high enough to to get caught by the return flow so this
contribution usually lead to a to a small sediment transport towards a shore
when we get into the braking zone we have a very strong energy
dissipation and turbulence is due to the wave breaking all the mechanisms
that are that we've seen outside the zone are also relevant inside the surf
zone but their significance is small because because they energy dissipation
in the wave boundary layer is is much smaller than the energy dissipation
due to breaking and as a suspended sediment profile is different due to
braking we have different contributions for the for the sand transport so in
the braking zone we can say that typically the usually the return flow and
the undertow dominates and as sediments are brought higher and
suspension because of the of the turbulence is due to breaking and the
sediment are have a tendency to to be transported towards the offshore
part of the profile so in the end the undertow will will be responsible for the
formation of longshore breaker bars and this is what we can see on this
animation so this is an animation of a cross short profile where we have
waves first subject to shelling and then to showing and then breaking and
we can see that that the coastal profile is developing and that we have
contributions in both direction so the undertow gives an offshore directed
transport in the surf zone and outside the surf zone the transform the
transport is weak with a tendency to the onshore direction so that was the
main principles of sediment transport both long shore sediment transport
and crush or sediment transport so now let's have a look on how this is
affected by the human projects and developments there are different types
of projects that are lead leading to two morphological impact on the coast
the coastal structures such as sports reclamation areas tidal Inlet jetties can
have a significant impact of shore structures even though they are not
located on the coast but if they are relatively close to the littoral zone you
can have an impact on the coast and this is a case for instance for
breakwater or wind farms or wind power plants or bridge for instance sand
mining and dumping of dredged material in can have a ignition impact on
the coast as well and finally the last one we're going to look at today's
interventions in river such as sand mining or depending of Navy navigation
navigation channels or the construction of dams and we will see how this
can have an impact on the on the shoreline so the coastal structure will
typically block the natural transport of sand along the coast and this will
have an impact on the adjacent shorelines so upstream will have
accumulation and downstream we will have erosion if the coast is long and
straight accretion and erosion will continue until the sediment can pass the
structure which may need lead to a potential need for maintenance of the
navigation channel and typically another problem that can be related to the
to the harbors for instance is the siltation in the basin so that's why it's
important to try to optimize harbor layouts in order to to avoid problems in
the harbor and around the harbor offshore developments can have an
impact on the coast as well but this impact is indirect so to speak because
it's usually due to the change of off cond offshore conditions so as we can
see here this offshore windfarm in the bottom left corner is sheltering has a
sheltering effect for the waves which can potentially affect the wave
conditions at the neighbouring island as we can see in the top right corner
the offshore development and all these artificial islands have an impact and
on the coast as well so we can see here that there are some arrows the red
arrows show the equilibrium orientation of the of the coast before the
construction of the of the of the development and the red arrows shows
equilibrium orientation after the the construction of the development so we
can see here that due to the construction we have a significant change in
the in the equilibrium orientation of the of the coast and that due to this
development the shoreline will respond accordingly finally the offshore
sand mining or dumping of sediment can have an impact as well because it
affects directly the the bathymetry and as a consequence this can have an
impact on an influence on the on the forcing currents and waves in the in
the shore close to the shore in the coastal zone it can be surprising but
River interventions can also have an impact on the on the shore this is
mostly due to to the fact that these interventions have an influence on the
sand supply to the coast so for instance when the sand mining occurs in the
river we reduce the we reduce the amount of sediments that are flowing
that are flowing towards the coast and therefore some the neighbouring
cost Attaway used to be supplied by sediment can suddenly start to lack
sediment and this can potentially cause a significant erosion the changes in
river flow due to dams or depending of navigation channel or river
regulation can have a significant impact on the coast as well the reduction
in the flow speed for instance can have an impact on the Delta formation
and the Delta stability which can potentially lead to to the fact that the river
outlets is retreated and therefore not able to supply in sediment the coast
shoreline protection against erosion can also have a significant impact on
the cause sometimes its own purpose sometimes it's not but for instance
here we had a we have a house that is located on the very close to the
shore where significant erosion is occurring and thereís been a revetment
constructed in order to block or to reduce the erosion of this stretch of
course as a revetment blocks part of this coastal profile it reduces erosion
at the implementation location but the problem is that the the stretch of
coast which is located just north of this area is now lacking sediment so as
we can see on these three pictures there is a very very quick erosion and
retreat of the shoreline that is happening so that's why it's important to be
careful when when choosing a shoreline protection because it can have also
it can also have significant effect on the neighboring coastline but this will
be the subject of the next webinar so thank you for your attention and the
next webinar will be held on the 9th of August and it will be about
shoreline protection against erosion if you if you have questions on this
webinar on today's webinar please please let me know thank you very
much
Design Principles for coastal development - Webinar
Share this tool with your friends!

  
Use Ctrl + F to search the transcript.
Copy transcriptRemove [*]
hello everyone and thank you for joining this webinar my name is Melvin
ribbon and I'm a coastal engineer at DHI Australia and during this webinar
we will talk about some design principles for coastal developments a lot of
the principles that are going to be detailed today are based on some
concept that have been developed in the two previous webinars these two
webinars are still available online so I suggest that you have a look at it the
idea of today's webinar is to detail some of the key principles that are
required when designing artificial beaches and harbors for instance this is
the agenda for today first we will detail some of the main principles for
artificial beaches and then we will look at some examples where these
principles have been applied in in real projects and then we will have a look
at the harbors and some of the principles for the design of the harbor
layout and we will go through a project where this harbour layout has been
has been optimized for diminishing the impact on the coast before having
a look at the main principles for coastal developments let's say let's have a
look at the concrete example of coastal development and this is a picture of
the state of Monaco which is located on the Mediterranean coast it's a very
small state and clave within France which means that it's constrained in its
surface and it's a very popular area which is very attractive so it has a very
high density of population it's actually the country with the highest density
of population in the world is about 18,000 inhabitants per square kilometer
which which is very very high as it can be seen on the on the picture on the
on the right in two days the total area of this state is about two hundred
and two hectares but among this two hundred hectares roughly 40 hectares
have been gained on water the map in the bottom left corner shows the
evolution of the ridge in time so we can see that over the last decades or
even century the overall shape of the country has actually changed quite a
lot in red we can see the the shape of the country in 1861 and we can see
that successive developments have been conducted mainly during the 20th
century all these developments consist in different types of careers some of
the extension are harbors for instance there are there have been some
artificial beaches that have been constructed some headlands have been
have been added to the to the shore some business areas a stadium a lot of
things that require some some space and that the molecular state has
gained on water and in 2006 the state of Monaco has decided to extend
even more their land on water and therefore they have asked some
architects and and big construction companies to come with some ideas of
design that could be added in the green area which is located in the center
part of the map this area is about 10 hectares and and basically the
architects and construction companies could provide any kind of IDs and
among these IDs the state would choose one that they prefer we can see
that a lot of different shapes and concepts are you so we have a very open
layout with some sort of offshore structures we have a very angular
development with a lot of narrow channels we have some floating islands
we have some creation like development so that's all these are that kind of
design that came and the problem with this development is that they're not
really realistic we can see that some of the some of this development would
would require some non existing technology and some of them would be
very difficult to build because it's it's a very difficult area to work with it's
very very steep and very rocky and on top of that some studies show that
some press preselected design were actually quite harmful for the coast
because it would it would limit the water renewal and it would change the
conditions along the beach that are that are on the coast so this design
were not very much satisfied satisfactory of course it's a bit futuristic and it
looks nice on pictures but when it's a matter of constructing it it can be
very difficult and very pricey and very harmful to the neighboring
environment so this is the design that has been selected and which is being
constructed right now so as we can see this design is very well integrated in
the existing landscape we can nearly not see it actually if we didn't know
that it was a drawing we could not guess that it's added to the to the actual
landscape so it's very well integrated it's easier to construct than most of
the previous layouts we've seen because it's it's not located offshore so it's
it's allows working in relatively shallow and why not even though in this
area it's it's already 30 40 meters deep and very steep but it it's easier to do
and therefore it's cheaper and also we can see that the the shape of the
Reclamation area is relatively well streamlined so some of the studies that
we've made showed that it would even increase the water ring you will add
the beaches which which are located close to the extension and therefore
improve the quality of the water at the beach so all in all this development
has only advantages and this is a good looks illustration of some of the
principles that we are going to look at afterwards so basically we try to
have a development that is well integrated in the existing landscape in
order to avoid critical bad impacts on the neighboring environment so this
extension is being constructed at the moment and then I'm pretty sure that
in the next decades we will completely forget that it's a it's completely new
area or neighborhood so being careful about the design of the
development is very important in order to avoid unexpected problems and
we are going to have a look at what it means for the design of artificial
beaches but first let's have a look at some of the characteristics of the good
beaches and coastal Lagoon so this is these are some pictures of nice
beaches around the world even one of them is an artificial beach that has
been constructed that's a long time ago and the elements that constitute
could be cheese and custom lagoons are basically the quality of sand so we
want to have a not too coarse sand the quality of water it's important when
we go and bath or swim in the water or when we do some activities in the
water that quality of water is good and that there are not some some
pollutant or components that would be harmful to us the ease of access is
also an important parameter because if we want to go on the beach it has
to be accessible to most of the people we don't want to have to struggle to
go to the beach it's it's better if it's easy to access on it the width of the
beach is also an important factor because if the beach is too wide it will
take and require a long time to go and swim for instance then the
swimming safety and the recreational activities that are available or that we
can do on this in this area are also important we want to be able to go and
swim safely so avoid a rip currents as illustrated in this in the top right
picture and finally the dunes and flora and fauna around the beach are also
something that make that make a beach a bit a bit better than another so
here are some principle of that that we use to to prepare and design
sustainable waterfront developments and in the case we're interested in
today in artificial beaches so what we want to have is stable beach basically
we don't wanna it's ready it's quite expensive to build an artificial beach
from crunch so we really want to have something that is stable and to
achieve that we try to have a plan form and a profile for the beach that is in
the key Librium shape and at the clipper um orientation then we would like
to have some terminal structures that will help keeping the sand along the
beach sections and avoid the center to move away from the beach and
then as we've seen in the previous webinar we would like to have a
relatively good exposure because we've seen that the wave exposure is is
an a very very important factor to maintain a good quality of sand and
that's that's something that is important when we designed the beach
obviously the exposure the exposure should not be too large because if the
waves are too strong it's gonna be dangerous for swimmers so it's nice it's
a matter of finding the right balance between too much or not enough
waves but of course safety should be should be considered the beach
material is also very important so we should try to aim at some medium
well solid sand which is usually which we can usually find in marine sin or
along the coast and finally the water quality is also very important and we
should ensure that the flashing of the coastal Lagoon is is good enough to
renew the water and avoid stagnant waters for instance so now we will go
through some of the principles so we can see here that we would like to
have a stable platform this is very closely related to the longshore transport
that we have detailed in the first and second webinar so basically we we
want to have a beach that is oriented in its equilibrium orientation so do
that we we have a very useful tool I've been talking about already
previously which is a Q alpha curve and this is a very useful tool because it
will help us finding the equilibrium orientation and see how far we are from
this equilibrium orientation so basically here we have a coastline which is
oriented towards 303 degrees north and this QL if a curve shows sent
transport rates as a function of the orientation and we can see that the
present orientation of the beach is 303 that that conduct to a long shore
sediment transport of about 15 thousand cubic meters per year and when
we design a new beach we want reorient realigned the beach in order to
face the equilibrium orientation which is in this case 284 degrees so that
means that in average the sediment transport will be zero along along the
beach if the orientation is set to this to this orientation of course the waves
are not always coming from the average direction so we have some
variations during the year and from season to season so we will have some
extreme westerly waves that will arise which will tend to turn the beach
counterclockwise in this case and some extreme northerly waves which will
tend to turn the beach in the other direction so that's why we have to add
some additional beach width in order to to absorb this natural variability
and all this can be assessed by using the q articles for specific stretch of
beach this was for the platform of the beach which should be stable but we
also would like to have an equilibrium profile for the beach if you
remember from the previous webinar we could we have seen that the
shape of the profile is mainly driven by the crush or sediment transport and
this is very much linked to episodic storms so basically during storms we
have acute erosion which lead to a flattening of the profile and during the
kalma period we have processes that tend to push back the sediment from
the deeper part of the profile towards other part of the beach when we will
add some sand to a beach it will naturally tend to adjust based on the on
the processes so here we can see on for example on that picture that we've
had it or some sand has been added to the beach and it's it has naturally
adjusted to the condition and the forcing by becoming very very stiff so
that's something we will like to to avoid and this can be done by putting
the sent in as close as possible to its equilibrium shape and by using sand
that is as close as possible to the to the existing one so we can avoid this
kind of problems by building artificial beaches with expected equilibrium
profile based on the on the composition of the sand that is used for for
building the the beach we should also keep in mind that as this is very
much related to events we should add a bit in the similar weight and then
for the platform we should add some additional beach with in order to
absorb the natural variability of the of the profile so in order to anticipate
what is going to be the equilibrium profile of a beach we use the dean
profile which relates the sediment size and the coastal profile so as we can
see on this figure we have different steepness of profiles depending on the
grain size of the median grain size so we we can see that for very coarse sin
we have very steep profile and for final sense we have flatter profile the
quality of the sin that is used for the artificial beaches is very important of
course it's important when we when we walk on it we prefer to walk on
some finer sand that on a very coarse gravels but it's also important with
regards to the stability of the of the beach itself usually we tend to avoid
sand from land sources because the sorting is relatively bad and it's either
too coarse or to fine if for instance we have a lot of fines contained in the
sand that is used for an artificial Beach as soon as it's placed in the in the
environment most of the fines will be washed away by the waves and
therefore the the volume of the of the beach will change dramatically and
the shape of the beach will change dramatically so that's something that
has to be considered when selecting the sand for the for the artificial Beach
with regard to the coastal lagoons one of the key parameters on the key
principles is to maintain a good water quality in the lagoon and to achieve
that we want to have a good flushing of the of the water from the lagoon
so it's renewed on a regular basis usually the water exchange in the coastal
Lagoon is driven by the by the tide in the end we want to have a sufficiently
large opening so it's a lot of water is getting in but we don't want to have it
too open because we want to maintain relatively calm environment so it's
once again it's a matter of finding the right balance but in general when we
have large openings we have better water exchange and therefore an
improved quality of water which is which is much better when we want to
when we want to swim or have some sport waters for or activities in the in
the lagoon so we will now have a look at an example where these principles
have been applied and on this map we can see we have Denmark and the
capital of Denmark Copenhagen is located where the red dot is and in
Copenhagen the new beach has been constructed which is which is named
Omar based on basically the side is very well protected due to a shallow
shore face and also due to the presence of the neighboring island which
limits the wave action along that Beach so we can see here on the wave
Rose that the wave height the significant wave height is nearly never above
80 centimeters which is very low and as we've seen in the previous webinar
the exposure of the of the beach to the wave sub drives the quality of the
of the beach and we can see on these pictures that these conditions led to
a very muddy Beach which was an attractive it's important to note that in
front of this beach there were some relatively deep channels where currents
was relatively strong and that is an important thing because it's going to be
used for the fatherfather development so if we think about the main
principles that we've detailed before and how we're going to apply them in
this specific case the beach is moved c watts to get more exposures from
the waves and therefore increase freshing of the fine sediments the beach
has been oriented towards prevailing waves so two main wave directions
from North East and from South East so we can see that the two stretches
of the beach have different orientation then some term structures and
headlands have been added in order to maintain the sand in each sediment
or in each stretch of the beach and between the actual land and the new
beach we have a coastal Lagoon which will have a good flashing because it
will use some of the currents satis some of the strong currents I was
mentioning before and also it has two openings so it rushes very very well
having the coastal Lagoon is also a way to minimize the quantity of sand
that is required to construct the beach so instead of having a plain beach
with sand everywhere we simply have a narrow Beach which is constructed
and we use remaining space to to construct a lagoon which is going to be
used for recreational activities and also which is protected from the from
the waves which is good for for swimmers for instance and this Beach has
been constructed a a couple of years ago now and bit more than ten years
ago so far the the beach has been working very well it's it's become a very
very popular beach it's very crowded in in summertime when the weather is
good in Copenhagen it's been working very well so no refiller has been
necessary so far and the lagoon is also very is also used a lot for
recreational activities so swimming and kayaking and some other activities
kite surfing for instance it has to be noted that this Beach was integrated in
some long-term development so for instance it's very easy to access from
from the city center of Copenhagen because there is a metro metro line
that is arriving there and since this Beach has been constructed the
neighborhood has completely change is now becoming one of the most
popular neighborhood in town and it's been growing extremely extremely
fast thanks to the to the presence of this speech which which was not the
case before it was more an unattractive neighborhood so this Beach has
completely changed the way this part of Copenhagen is behaving and NEA
is now a great great asset for the for the city this is another example of
project where j.chan has been working so this is located in the sense the
Fano in in Alexandria which is located on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt
and basically in this case we have completely opposite situation than the
previous project we've been looking at in Denmark because in this case we
have no beach before the construction of the project and we have a
relatively rough conditions where whereas in the previous case we had not
enough wave exposure to maintain a good quality for the beach so let's see
how this condition have been used for the design of a new artificial Beach
and basically what's been done is to search inspiration in in nature what
you can see on the picture here is a is a natural Beach located in Portugal
and this shape has inspired the development and the concept for the new
artificial Beach which is detailed on the drawing on the on the right so
basically we have an equilibrium Bay protected by by big structures and
with a relatively small opening so we have the large waves coming from the
from the offshore part and these waves are diffracted through the entrance
of the of the bay so we reduce the wave action in the beach and along the
beach but we still maintain a little a little bit of action to ensure a good
exposure of the beach but on the other hand we managed to reduce quite
significantly the wave action and once again since we have these structures
to maintain the sand in the units in this location we we don't really need to
to refill the beach which is which is also very good so to successfully design
these artificial beaches it's usually the same procedure that is applied every
time first it's important to to analyze and understand the natural processes
and we usually use numerical models in order to test the design that we
imagined for the further development and potentially adjust it depending
on the modeling results so it should have an acceptable impact on the on
the neighbouring stretches of coast and also it should obey the setback
regulations in the end the numerical models are are very useful to optimize
and check all these all these points we've seen that most of the design that
we've looked at are using coastal structures it's important to have in mind
that when we when we design a man-made beach we will most of the time
require some structures to maintain the sand at its location and if it's
designed well we can we can see that for instance on this on this picture
which has been taken in Denmark we can see that some of these structures
can actually be quite nice looking and and be actually an asset for the
beach so it should not only be seen as a negative thing to to use these
structures but because if the design is is well done it can have a positive
impact actually so that was for the artificial beaches let's now have a look at
the ports and for the pots it's a bit different I will start by going through
this example here which is located in India where we had this stretch of
coast and harbor has been constructed along that coast and this is a
picture from 2009 so we can see that the shoreline is relatively straight and
after years this structure has been constructed and we can see that there is
a significant accumulation on the western side of the breakwater and some
erosion on the eastern part of the coast so this was in 2010 so this structure
we can see have a significant impact on the on the shoreline which
continues this is a picture two years later so we can see that the beach has
even more advanced in the water and that erosion has been continuing on
the down-drift side of the of the structure and a new structure has been
constructed this is a very typical situation and we can see that it's the same
story that starts again with accumulation along that structure and it's
important when deciding on the design of a harbor to make sure that it will
have as little impact as possible on the neighboring adjacent stretches of
coast and here we have a summary of some of the issues faced by the by
the port so we can have sedimentation in the navigation channel or
seaweed accumulation in the basin or wave disturbance in the harbor and
difficult conditions for the ship navigations for instance and also when the
harbor is constructing it can it can cause significant impact as we have seen
before so a creation on the upper east side and erosion on the down-drift
side we typically distinguish three types of harbors and these three types of
harbor have different characteristics first one is a single main break water
port which works by protecting the basin from the main waves by by the
use of of a usually curved breakwater then we will have then we have the
double breakwater port which consists in two curved breakwater and it
protects the the inner part of the harbor Basin by because thanks to the
diffractions through the hollow entrance and sometimes if the diffraction is
not enough some internal breakwaters can can be added and then we have
the offshore breakwater which is very often used when when the harbour is
located in a very shallow environment and this type of port is also
interesting because we can by designing it properly we can minimize the
impact it will have on the coast and it's also interesting to know that since
it's located in deeper water we avoid sedimentation problem and and we
minimize the capital dredging of the outer harbor so let's start with a single
main breakwater so in this case we have a situation where the harbor is
located on the coast with typical incident wave directions from north west
and due to these waves we have a relatively strong current that is going
towards towards East usually this type of structure and this type and this
shape of harbor is generating a lot of circulations around the structures so
as illustrated and on the other current field that results from from a
numerical model we can see that there is a large ad that is generated close
to the entrance this is an example of a double breakwater port which is
located in Malaysia so as I said before the this type of harbor works by
reducing the wave energy in the basin thanks to the diffraction through the
through the harbor entrance compared to the previous shape or type of
layout that we've looked at in the single breakwater harbor this kind of this
kind of shape reduces recirculation currents because it has a more
streamlined shape and usually we tend to put the entrance of the of this
kind of harbor as far as possible from the from the shallow area in order to
limit the low-frequency motion in and out of the of the harbor Basin and
finally we can have a look at the offshore breakwater port this type of port
is composed of usually shore power breakwater located in an offshore
location along the coast as we have seen during the webinar about coastal
protection against erosion the two main important parameters for
designing this type of port is are the lengths of this breakwater and the
location of the breakwater in comparison with surf zone so if if these two
parameters are set properly we can minimize the impact on the coasts
however as we can see on this picture in this specific case this very long
breakwater has had a significant impact on the on the coast so we can see
a relatively large accumulation in the shelter of the structure and we can
also see that this has been leading to some sort of erosion south of the
structure because we can see that some some groins have been added in
order to maintain the sin in its location so now I will talk a little bit about
optimization of the pot layouts so as I briefly mentioned before one of the
very important parameters is width of the surf zone and the in comparison
with the width of the harbor so typically when we have small harbors
located inside the surf zone the navigation channels have to be maintained
and very often some reservoirs sediment reservoirs are dredged in order to
to catch the sand before it deposits in the navigation channel and then the
sin has to be bypassed somehow on the other side of the of the harbor so
it this can be done by by dredging this this sin and disposing it further
down drift it's important that this sin is reintroduced in the system some of
the hardest for instance sell the the sin so they can make very good
business out of it but the problem is that this enhance the the erosion of
the of the down down drift stretch of course so therefore it's very important
that the sin that is stretch is put back in the system along the coast so it so
we we minimize the impact of the hammer then when we have very large
harbors that that penetrate the entire surf zone and active littoral zone then
there is no way that the same bypasses naturally the the structures so it it
completely blocks the sediment transport along the coast and that's where
the impact on the neighboring shoreline is the most important because
absolutely no sand from from the drift location is reaching the downdraft
area so that's that's a big problem and and in this case the sin has to be
moved manually or artificially to towards towards the downdraft area and
this is a this is a sketch of a layout of double breakwater layout where we
try to minimize the coastal impact of the structure once again it's it's the
idea behind this concept drawing is to have something that is as less
intrusive as possible in the in the natural environment so to achieve that we
we tend to have a smooth alignment of the breakwater with a relatively
narrow entrance so it so the currents can more easily pass by the structures
then we need to we try to have a good connection of the breakwaters to
the coastline so we avoid the sheltered area where accumulation of sand
and circulations will would occur if if it was to a to angular shape and then
we maintain the navigation depth by by dredging or or bypassing the the
sand that is not able to achieve it naturally when we talk about bypassing
the sediment there are different ways of doing it - the two main methods
are either die by using a dredger basically what the dredger does is is when
the when the sedimentation in the navigation channel occurs and when the
the critical depths for navigation is reached or a bit before the dredger
goes out and dredged some of the sand and then this n is put back on the
down dressed part of the of the coast either by using a fixed pipe or by
regular dumping for instance another way of bypassing the sediment is by
using large structures as illustrated on the on the aerial picture that is that
is shown here so this is a picture taken in the in the Gold Coast so this is the
entrance of the Gold Coast sea where where we have these two large
structures that blocks the the littoral drift and we can see on the thousand
part that there are some there is a JD that contains a lot of pimps and these
firms Treach the same so we can see that it's actually much more deep
below the below the jetty and all the sin that is found from this jetty is
discharged on the northern side of the of the structure so that that's
another way of bypassing the sediment that are that would be blocked by
the by the structure and I will now go through an example where we've
optimized the harbour layout that was causing a lot of problems and
having a lot of problems with maintaining a decent navigation depth so we
can easily recognize Denmark again so we are not located on the on the
islands as Copenhagen but now we're looking at a site which is located on
the on the North Sea which is called VSN on the west coast of Denmark so
it's highlighted by the by the red circle and this how the town is located at
a at a tidal Inlet on the Sandy barrier and as indicated by the wave rose
which is plotted here we have a very very severe wave climate nearly 90% of
the time we have more than half a meter waves at this location and and it
can even reach a regular basis for meters that leads to a net little drift of
more than a million cubic meters per year toward south and here is a
picture of the old layout of the harbor so basically we have the this town
which is located at the at the inlet and what has been what has happened is
that first Harbor has been constructed some time ago where and this led to
erosion and sedimentation problems around the harbour so in 1963 a new
breakwater has been constructed about 400 meter long basically the this
breakwater was blocking most of the sediment transport so this conducted
to a drift accumulation of a lot of sand in average eighty thousand cubic
meters per year and it's been estimated that this accumulation extends up
to 3.5 kilometres north of the breakwater and other consequence of this
accumulation the down drift erosion was was very very large as well
because all this sand that was accumulated along the breakwater is now
lacking south of the of the town so about three hundred thousand cubic
meters per year were placed along the along the coast south of the town so
that was a situation before the optimization of the layout and we can see
that we are facing very very large numbers and of course one of the key
element when we are talking about a about harbor is the depth of the
navigation channel and the access channel in this area they had to do a lot
of server in order to investigate whether there was some risk for this
followed critical depths for navigation to be reached and this this is an
example on the left of one of the surveys where we can see that we have an
offshore bar that is progressing toward south and in a bar that is also
progressing and reaching the breakwater and we can also see that due to
this this shape we have ad forming south of the harbor which tends to
bring sediments in the in the entrance of the harbor so with this whole the
harbor layout they had very they had a lot of problem maintaining a decent
depth and the natural depth of the bypass bar was two point five meter
where has the navigation and depth of 4.5 had to be maintained so this
required a maintenance dredging of about 170,000 cubic meters per year
which is which is quite a lot and before optimizing the the shape of the
layer we spend quite a lot of time of on English investigating the the
coastal processes that we were facing along that coast we were we were we
were really lucky because a lot of surveys bathymetric survey has been
made for more than 50 years and therefore it was a very useful all these
were very useful information and thanks to this all this survey the behavior
of the lung of the bar has been studied precisely and this is very important
because a lot of sediment transport occur on the bar so if we understand
the way this these bars evolve in time then we can potentially understand
where the sediment transport is and this can be very useful when designing
the harbor and what we found with thanks to this this analysis is that the
bars were following a relatively stable cycle here we can see the evolution
in time of the distance between the the shoreline and the nd of Shaba and
we can see that it's a relatively consistent behavior that has been identified
in this in these two profiles so here we can see some of the some of the
profiles that have been extracted so in the black thick line we have the
measured profile and in in the dotted line we have the average profile over
time and this behavior that that we've detailed before is very easy to see so
we can see that in 1992 the bar is generated and a virus is is present in the
profile and then it slowly moves towards the offshore part of the profile
and in 1996 a second one is generating it's generated close to the shore
and this bar will start migrating towards your shop R as well we can see that
it's not purely purely linear so we have some some features that appear and
disappear from from time to time but this is this is normal because this is
due to the natural variations of the of the climate and it's not consistent all
the time then depending on the distance between the bar and the
shoreline we have we have an increasing depths when when we when we
get far from the from the coastline so that was a very interesting study and
very useful when designing the harbor because it was important to identify
the sediment transport for these different types of profiles so we've
extracted representative single and double bod profile and make some
sediment transport calculations with our 1d model in order to assess the
ability to bypass sediment in time and depending on the on the profile then
after this analysis morphological model has been has been set for the
project so this morphological model was based on that mitri survey that
were done in the in front of the breakwater so a calibration period has been
has been selected and this calibration period was featuring relatively severe
storm as we can see on the top plot we have significant wave height of up
to 5 meters so that was very very very strong wave and and as we can see
on the 2 bathymetric survey before and after the storm the sandbar has
been migrating quite a lot during that storm so that's what we were aiming
at when calibrating the model here is an animation of the calibration of the
model so we can see that during the the selected storm we have the part
that is that is moving towards towards us and the model results were pretty
good so what we see here is measured elevation along the bar so we can
see in black that's before the storm and in red what has been measured
after the storm so we can see that the bar has been moving toward South
quite a lot and in blue we can see that the model was performed of
performing quite well to reproduce this this behavior once we've calibrated
our model we are ready to to test some potential new design and this is
what we what thi has proposed so basically the existing breakwater has
been slightly extended and curved in order to increase the bypass and and
then and another breakwater has been constructed south of the port in
order to have this this double breakwater shape that is well streamline and
that will be able to bypass sediment and minimize and sedimentation in the
in the channel moreover on on top of this of these structures we propose
to to dredge a lot of the sin that is that has that had accumulated AB drift
of the harbor and the idea behind this this capital dredging was to make
sure that we that we have sediment transport on the outer bar and one of
the issues we've had with when when working with with this project is that
the the before the the extension of the harbor they wanted to the harbour
wanted to maintain navigation depth of 4.5 meters but during the project
they wanted to increase navigation depth up to 6 meters and at the same
time they wanted to reduce sedimentation in the access channel so that
changed a bit the the conditions that we were looking at so we had a we
have a calibrated model and we want to try a new design so what we what
we've done is to use to select a series of storms that are illustrated here on
the on the wave rows so we can see it's a very severe weather climate and
but that was a that was a trick in order to be able to to simulate a yearly
sediment transport in in a shorter period in to speed up the the
computational time on the little drift calculations we can see the average
yearly transport in in solid lines and the dotted line is model results and we
can see that on the outer bar we have very good correlations between the
between the artificial wave climate that we are using and the average wave
climate and based on this on this 55 days climate we've been simulating the
morphological evolution of the bypass bar because that's what we were
aiming at and we can see that based on them on the calculations been
made the equilibrium depth of the bypass spa was reaching about four
point five meter which was exactly what what the harbor wanted before
they realized that they wanted to have a larger navigation depth so that
was pretty interesting but in the end as they they decided to to increase the
navigation that they still have to conduct some maintenance stretching in
order to to remove some of the sin because the bypass bar is not deep
enough and this is a picture of the constructed harbor which which works
pretty well now and and the harbor is very happy the port is very happy
missing with it so that was it for for today as we've seen in the last example
there was there's been a lot of modeling involved in the in the optimization
of this harbor layout and and that will be the subject of the next webinar
which will be held on the 6th of September 2018 and during this webinar
we will talk about modeling sediment transport and in shoreline evolution if
you have any questions regarding what has been said today and and about
this this principle feel free to contact me I'll be happy to answer your your
question now I will spend a bit of time on answering the question that's
been asked during the presentation thank you very much you