Mooring of vessels is very important for safe and efficient cargo handling of ships in ports, just as safe infrastructure is important. Civil Engineers and Mariners used to have a different approach for the same problem: what should be the safe working load (SWL) of a bollard. Mariners use the Minimum Breaking Load (MBL) of their mooring lines to determine the desired Safe Working Load (SWL) of the bollard, civil engineers commonly use design tables from international standards or guidelines with a relation between displacement of the vessel and bollard loads. There is a big gap between these two approaches, especially concerning the mooring of large container vessels. Both disciplines meet each other in dynamic mooring analysis (DMA); a computer calculation that calculates the vessel motions and resulting maximum loads on the mooring point resulting from wind, wave (sea, swell), current and passing vessel forces acting on the moored vessel. As a DMA is a rather complex calculation, a DMA is not carried out for every project and usually not in a preliminary design stage. This position paper describes a design approach for bollard loads that is understandable and acceptable for all involved disciplines and that is used by the Port of Rotterdam Authority for new builds. @en

The PIANC ‘Guidelines for the design of fender systems’ MarCom report of WG 33 – 2002 specifies allowable maximum hull pressures for various vessels. Fender manufactures provide maximum hull pressures resulting from their fenders. The stated maximum hull pressures of cylindrical fenders exceed the recommended values by PIANC 2002 for gas carriers, oil tankers and container vessels. However, cylindrical fenders are in use for over 25 years in North West Europe on major container terminals without any complaints by masters, ship owners, pilots or any other stake holder. In the Hamburg – Le Havre range only the Port of Rotterdam Authority had, mid eighties, these fenders (Delta Terminal) checked against the old fender guidelines. After PIANC 2002 release all new projects are equipped with panels with cone fenders or similar. The maintenance department of the Port of Rotterdam has fairly bad experience with panel fenders as recently applied at the new container terminals and has quite positive experience with the ‘old’ cylindrical fenders. The positive user experience with cylinders and the negative maintenance experience with panels lead to plans with cylindrical fenders on an LNG berth and on six oil berths. The actual ship-fender interaction was investigated by FEM calculations as these cylindrical fenders do not match PIANC 2002 recommendations. The outcome of these FEM calculations is that cylindrical fenders can safely be used for both LNG carriers and oil tankers. This paper explains theseFEM calculations and the old calculations for the Delta Terminal and shows that cylindrical fenders can be used safely on liquid bulk terminals and gives a perspective for container terminals. The authors recommend that table 4.4.1 in PIANC 2002 will be updated. @en

The stability of any structure is an important aspect in civil engineering. This aspect is the subject of the researched quay wall at the Amazonehaven, port of Rotterdam. The quay wall with a relieving platform structure had in various section, over the entire 900m length of the quay, large deformations at the toe of the combined wall. The purpose was to analyse and quantify the influence of the deformed combined wall on the stability of the quay wall, its service lifetime. To obtain a better insight into the concept of stability, analytical methods based on the Blum theory, beam on elastic foundation method and finite element method using Plaxis 3D were applied and compared. The finite element method, Plaxis 3D, proved to be a better method to investigate the quay wall. Plaxis 3D takes into account the 3-dimensional effects of the quay wall and considers the actual soil behaviour during calculation which is a sophisticated manner of modelling a quay wall. A calibration model (which is the actual designed quay wall) and a series of models with various penetration depth of the combined wall are modelled. Also, a safety analysis of the soil parameters were applied to the various models.@en

The rapid development in containership dimensions creates a huge challenge for ports. But for one port basin in Rotterdam this challenge was too big. The nautical restrictions for the Amazonehaven would start at such moderate conditions that the basin would be closed for Ultra Large Container Ships (ULCS) about a 100 days a year. As this basin contains more than 60 percent of the deep sea quay length at ECT, Europe’s largest container terminal, the Port of Rotterdam Authority decided to widen the basin by demolishing the opposite iron ore bulk quay wall. In this way vessels up to 18.000 TEU have access up to 6 Beaufort wind speed. This quay wall, with a length of 950 meters and a retaining height of 32 meters, was con-structed between 1988 and 1990 with an inclined steel combi wall, concrete pre stressed bear-ing piles, MV piles and a massive concrete superstructure. It is the first ever demolished quay wall on this scale in Rotterdam and, as far as the authors know, even globally. Before the demolition could start, a new quay wall, with a length of 2500 meters was con-structed and over 3 million cubic meters of sand had to be removed. All works are executed without interrupting the process at the ECT terminal. The paper describes the necessity of the widening project and focusses on the demolishing process and especially the lessons learned from this project. Most important items are unex-pected heavy pile damage probably due to heavy pile driving during construction and the drill and blast operation in an operational port basin. @en