Aug 18 • Machinist

Extending the Service Life of Quay Walls Through Monitoring

Quay walls are critical assets for modern ports, but many remain in operation beyond their original design life. Instead of automatically replacing ageing infrastructure, ports are increasingly using structural and geotechnical monitoring to understand actual condition, remaining capacity and long-term performance. This allows maintenance, rehabilitation and reuse decisions to be based on measured behaviour rather than design assumptions alone.

Ground conditions can make both quay wall construction and foundation design particularly challenging. At the Port of Rotterdam, foundations often extend into very dense Pleistocene sand, where CPT cone resistance can locally reach around 80 MPa. While these layers provide excellent bearing capacity, they can also create installation difficulties, including pile refusal or damage. Different techniques — including vibration, impact driving, drilling and soil fluidisation — may therefore be required depending on the foundation system and ground conditions.

Modern piling equipment provides contractors with greater flexibility when adapting installation methods to changing soil conditions. Solutions such as MOVAX excavator-mounted piling equipment represent technologies used across the industry for different pile installation requirements.

Large deep-sea quay walls can require thousands of piles and anchors. Because conventional design standards may intentionally use conservative assumptions, full-scale testing and monitoring can reveal additional foundation capacity that is not reflected in standard calculations. Tests performed in Rotterdam, for example, measured shaft resistance in dense sand substantially above the limiting values used in the referenced Dutch design approach. Even relatively small improvements in foundation design can therefore lead to significant reductions in material consumption, construction costs and environmental impact.

Monitoring should not end once construction is completed. Long-term measurements of anchor forces and wall movements provide valuable information about how a quay wall responds to operational loads and changing environmental conditions. At one monitored structure, researchers observed both seasonal variations and gradual changes in anchor loads and wall deformation, demonstrating the importance of evaluating foundation behaviour throughout the entire service life.

The next step is to connect ground investigation, pile installation records and long-term structural monitoring within a single digital environment. Research at Delft University of Technology is exploring how CPT data, installation parameters, sensor measurements and numerical models can be combined to create digital representations of quay walls. Such digital twins can help engineers identify changes in structural behaviour and make more reliable predictions about remaining service life.

Ultimately, lifecycle monitoring can change how ports manage their infrastructure. Instead of replacing a quay wall simply because it has reached a nominal design age, asset owners can evaluate its actual performance and remaining capacity. Combining foundation testing, installation data, continuous monitoring and digital modelling supports safer design optimisation, targeted maintenance and potential reuse of existing structures — reducing both lifecycle costs and the environmental impact of new construction.

Sources:
rnd(at)machinist.fi 
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