International - ECSMGE-special

The New Kattwyk Bridge in Hamburg is currently being realised by of the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA). A special construction method was chosen for the realisation of the river piers. The pneumatic sinking technique, among other specialties, was used in relation to this. Pneumatic sinking means working under an overpressure with all the safety measures that this entails. It also means that working hours are seriously limited when sinking up to a water depth of 32 m. Volker Staal en Funderingen (VSF), the subcontractor for sinking the river piers of the New Kattwyk Bridge, has therefore mechanised the sinking process innovatively. The soil under the caissons is excavated in a remotely controlled manner and disposed of while deploying occasionally. This article discusses the implementation concept for the river piers, the development of sinking in a remotely controlled manner and the expected and unexpected challenges that must be resolved during implementation.

Imagine having access to the status of your operational assets from the comfort of your office, whenever you want.

This is essentially what you get from Fugro SITE-SPOT: up-to-date digital 3D asset information hosted on a web portal to enable smarter, safer and more productive operations.

In late 2016, Drukpaal.nl and A.P. van den Berg were the first companies in the Netherlands to start using the pile pushing method in combination with conventional precast concrete piles. Instead of traditional pile driving using a hammer, this system pushes precast concrete piles into the ground. This results in proven high-quality foundations that are installed without the usual noise and vibrations.

Measurements performed so far (as every pushed pile is basically a compression test in its own right) seem to corroborate that the pile base coefficient (α_p) is 1.0 (instead of the factor of 0.7 used in the Dutch standard).

Thanks to continuous recording of data, the pile pushing method offers excellent opportunities for quality improvement or responsible application of safety factors. For example, the fact that this piling method measures resistance from the moment of entry into the soil and throughout the pile pushing process, much like a cone penetration test, makes it possible to correlate the load-bearing capacity, cone penetration curve, and readings from the pushing force recording system to a demonstrable safety level through expert assessment.

In other words, continuous pushing force recording will in future have to be considered a kind of (verification) cone penetration test that would make it possible to set the correlation factors (ξ) at 1.0.

Extreme weather events such as long and/or intensive rainfall can lead to instability of natural and man-made slopes. In the Netherlands, it is expected that the changing climate will possibly impose increased frequency or intensity of such extreme weather events. These will likely influence the state of existing and mostly aging transport embankments that were not designed with climate change aspects in mind. Therefore, there is a need to better understand how these embankments will perform under climate change scenarios and if necessary, devise plans for adapting them to new climatic conditions. We provide a method to estimate the effect of climate change on geotechnical stability of road embankments. A series of fully coupled hydro-mechanical analyses under unsaturated condition are carried out on a typical road embankment. A selection of probable climate scenarios for the next 70 years is applied to the calculations in terms of rainfall intensity and duration. The results compare the current climate based on historical data with the climate scenario around 2085, as reported from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, KNMI. The authors also looked at how the development of soil desiccation cracks, after prolonged periods of drought, effect the stability of the road embankment.

Landslides are catastrophic geo-hazards that threaten urbanization. Growth in population besides construction of critical infrastructures such as roads and pipelines in landslide-prone areas elevates the risk associated with landslides. Therefore, a system that is able to predict landslides and issues warning in a timely manner is very appealing. It is widely accepted that precipitation is one of the most influential factors for triggering landslides. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of a practical research study that has been carried out in Deltares. To that end, we have set up a framework that combines geo-engineering, remote sensing, hydrology with machine learning to predict the onset of landslides under the effect of precipitation. In this data-driven approach, Machine Learning (ML) methods are used to predict landslides by exploiting multiple Earth observation datasets, including rainfall data (e.g. TRMM 3B42) and Digital Elevation Models (e.g. SRTM) and the NASA Global Landslide Catalogue. A detailed inventory of landslides at a global level is built out of which a supervised machine learning algorithm is trained with landslide/non-landslide events. The trained ML model is then fed by rainfall data, topography features such as slope and elevation relief, soil and bedrock data, and vegetation index of target regions to assess the stability of the studied area.