Hydraulic Engineering

Our coast protects us from the water; it is necessary understand its dynamic processes and to retain the sand at the coast. Natural influences such as wind and waves are constantly changing the coastline. Another important process affecting the coastline is often overlooked: human activity. To investigate this, Roderik Lindenbergh of TU Delft receives a grant from the NWO's Open Technology Programme for the AdaptCoast project.

Most concrete bridges on our highways have been there for more than sixty years. They tirelessly carry heavily loaded trucks. How long can we still rely on these bridges? Yuguang Yang and his colleagues made precise replicas of existing bridge parts. Last week in the lab at TU Delft, they loaded one of the replicas till collapsing: how many trucks can the bridge ultimately carry? The first impression from the tests turned out to be positive; the experiments suggest that the bridges may be stronger than initially thought. Some of bridges can hopefully last a while and do not need to be strengthened or replaced yet.

Deltas and coastal plains are attractive places to live: fertile, flat, and open to the sea. These lowlands are, however, also vulnerable to climate change and sea-level rise. To better predict how deltas develop in the future, a thorough understanding is needed of biogeomorphology- how organisms, currents, waves, water, and sand discharge shape the delta-landscape. It was announced today that Δ-ENIGMA, a project focusing on this formation of the delta landscape, is one of the projects that will be funded from the National Roadmap for Large-Scale Research Infrastructure (LSRI) call of the Dutch Research Counsil (NWO).