DFI Europe Member Report: Port of Rotterdam Written by Egbert van de Wal, manager of the engineering department at the Port of Rot- terdam, 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 maxi- mum business potential for our tenants. Most of the infrastructure, especially the Maritime Port Infrastructure, is in need of a solid foundation. The Port of Rot- terdam invests more than €80 million annually on deep foundations. Changes to pile design standards in the Netherlands (as 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, environ- mental 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 Rijks- waterstaat on a project that will develop a holistic solution with field testing, lab and numerical modelling in conjunction with advanced statistical approaches to pro- vide 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 Nether- lands Standardization Institute (NEN). Full-scale field test 62 • DEEP FOUNDATIONS • MAY/JUNE 2020
