Artificial nourishment

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Revision as of 14:37, 21 August 2008 by Jan van de Graaff (talk | contribs) (Shoreface nourishments)
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Tina Mertens is working on this article. For information on beach nourishment, see Experiences with beach nourishments in Portugal and shore nourishment.

Introduction

Artficial nourishments

The basis of this article is especially written for the Coastal Wiki by the main author referred to at the bottom of this page. This article gives insight in the application and the implications of artificial nourishments. For an additional view on methods, functional characteristics and applicability of artificial nourishments, you are referred to the article shore nourishment.

Introduction

Artificial nourishments are examples of projects where the coastal system is fed with sediments (sand) from a source (borrow area) at a certain distance from the project area. Other examples of projects where the coastal system is fed, are large scale land reclamation projects and the construction of an artificial island in open sea. In these cases often huge volumes of sand are required; up to several hundreds of millions m3 per project.

In this article on artificial nourishments applications with moderate volumes per project are discussed (order of magnitude up to 10 million m3 per project).

But why should one apply artificial beach nourishments? Artificial nourishments can be applied in various cases; e.g.:

  1. to broaden the beach (recreation purposes);
  2. to create entirely new beaches (recreation purposes);
  3. to enhance the safety of the mainland or to enhance the safety of properties built rather close to the edge of the dunes;
  4. to compensate losses because of structural erosion.

The first three cases are to be considered as applications to improve an existing undesirable situation. With a mainly single action a ‘better’ situation is achieved. In principle a single action indeed, although often some relatively small maintenance nourishments are necessary in order to keep the situation as required according to the design conditions.

In the fourth case artificial nourishments are applied as a tool in coastal protection projects. Because of structural erosion sediments are more or less continuously lost out of a stretch of coast; (frequent) artificial nourishments are required to compensate on average the occurring losses.

So depending on the actual aim of the nourishment project, the nourishment can be carried out as a mainly single action or the nourishment has to be repeated on a regular basis.

To carry out an artificial nourishment project, various methods can be applied; see e.g. xxxx)

Application

Conditions

See Also

References


  1. The Netherlands
  2. Spain
  3. Sweden
  4. United Kingdom
The main author of this article is Tina Mertens
Please note that others may also have edited the contents of this article.

Citation: Tina Mertens (2008): Artificial nourishment. Available from http://www.coastalwiki.org/wiki/Artificial_nourishment [accessed on 31-10-2024]