Dredging history of the river Waal and expected future dredging works

Dredging history of the river Waal and expected future dredging works

Bardoel, J.W.S.

De Vriend, H.J. (mentor)
Havinga, H. (mentor)
Van Heereveld, M.A. (mentor)
Blom, A. (mentor)
Sloff, C.J. (mentor)

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Hydraulic Engineering

River Engineering

2010-10-28

Rijkswaterstaat is responsible for maintaining the fairway of the river Waal for navigation for more than a hundred years. In the past problem areas, which cause hindrance for navigation and block the fairway, were prevented with structural measures. Dredging was used as a last resort. In 2005 the desired fairway depth was increased from BRV -2,5m to BRV -2,8m which changed the role of dredging in the maintenance of the fairway. The dredging of the fairway is now executed through a performance-based contract. Today dredging is seen more as a permanent measure and is constantly used to maintain the fairway. In the last hundred years an increasing number of measurements have been executed on the river Waal and have been stored in databases. This data is currently hardly used for the day-to-day maintenance of the river system. This research aims at gaining more insight in the dredging efforts needed to maintain the fairway using the available data from Rijkswaterstaat. Former dredging contracts as well as the currently used performance-based contract were studied in order to get a better understanding of the efforts needed to maintain the fairway for navigation. It was tried to deduce a relation, between the discharge hydrograph and the efforts that are needed to maintain the fairway, in order to obtain an indication of the consequences of expected future changes to the river system. The expected future changes which were studied in this research are changing the currently used river groynes and climate change. The relation found could unfortunately not be used to indicate the possible consequences of changing the groynes on the necessary dredging efforts but it could be used to indicate the consequences of climate change on the necessary dredging efforts. Climate change will cause a major increase in the necessary dredging efforts.

Waal
dredging
climate change
Groyne
river maintenance

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7fd9405f-9935-4895-b62d-4c3e51b22a25

2010-11-11

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Bardoel, J.W.S.