DFI Magazine May/June 2020 - 62

DFI Europe Member Report: Port of Rotterdam

Written by Egbert van de Wal, manager of the
engineering department at the Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and corresponding
member of the DFI Europe Board of Trustees
The Port of Rotterdam is the biggest,
most advanced port in Europe. At present,
port management is investing heavily in
infrastructure, digitalization and the energy
transition. But to stay relevant, you have to
stay ahead. Even in these troubling days, the
port remains open for business, and we are
looking ahead to investing in the future of
our port and the operations of our tenants.
In this day and age there are so many
new techniques and engineering insights
like finite element models, probabilistic
design, solutions to slow down degradation,
digital modeling, and last but not least,
embedded sensor techniques. These
approaches give us an infinite amount of
additional information about actual loads,
actual strengths, deformations and soil
behavior. And they give us the advantage of
being able to safely enhance the capabilities
of our infrastructure and to ensure maximum business potential for our tenants.
Most of the infrastructure, especially
the Maritime Port Infrastructure, is in need
of a solid foundation. The Port of Rotterdam invests more than €80 million
annually on deep foundations. Changes to
pile design standards in the Netherlands (as

Full-scale field test

62 * DEEP FOUNDATIONS * MAY/JUNE 2020

of January 1, 2017) have resulted in the
installation of larger piles, and in increases
in both construction time and associated
installation risks. In addition, environmental revisions to the new code require
reduced use of nonrenewable resources,
and reduced noise and vibrations. An
estimate of the combined effect of these
changes is an increase in construction costs
of 10-20 percent for all deep foundations
projects in the Netherlands.
The change in design standards arose
due to gaps in the knowledge surrounding
some key aspects of deep foundation
behavior, which include gaps regarding soil

fatigue effects during cyclic pile installation
and loading, soil ageing around piles, the
effects of natural soil stratification, and of
the use of potentially conservative limiting
soil strength values in the national NEN
design code.
At present, the port is working together
with TU Delft, Fugro, Deltares and Rijkswaterstaat on a project that will develop a
holistic solution with field testing, lab and
numerical modelling in conjunction with
advanced statistical approaches to provide accurate calculation procedures for
determining the axial capacity of a pile.
The end goal is to come up with a new
approach for calculating pile foundations
that is more in line with the real behavior of
axial-loaded piles.
A major milestone was the full-scale pile
test on prefab concrete piles, screw injection
piles and vibro piles at Maasvlakte 2 from
December 3, 2019, through late January.
The tested piles have a length of 33 m to 37 m
(108 ft to 121 ft) and were tested to failure
with a load of about 21,000 kN (472 kip).
The preliminary results of the full-scale field
test prove that the actual bearing capacity
gives higher values than required by the
national code. The final results are still under
review and continue to be discussed by the
Geotechnical Committee of the Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN).
DFI Magazine May/June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DFI Magazine May/June 2020
