Sustainability improvement of maintenance and repair stages: damage evolution analysis and maintenance strategies
Breakwater design considers the level of damage that can be tolerated. It has been common practice to design breakwaters to allow the lowest possible level of damage over their useful life (typically more than 25 years), namely the initiation of damage threshold. In a probabilistic calculation, the level of damage will never be zero, so there will always be a need to maintain and/or repair the breakwater to keep it working throughout its useful life.
On the other hand, different maintenance strategies can be adopted throughout the useful life of the breakwater, ranging from preventive maintenance to avoid major repairs, to zero maintenance and only repairing when absolutely necessary. Adopting different strategies can result in greater or lesser CO2 emissions and therefore greater or lesser sustainability throughout the useful life.
Reduced-scale tests will be carried out on the case study previously defined under three
working hypotheses, in order to assess the impact of the different strategies on the sustainability of the breakwater maintenance: (1) no maintenance until the breakwater is destroyed; (2) preventive maintenance after each storm resulting in units extraction of the main layer; (3) repair when the level of damage reaches the secondary layer.
Milestone 4. 1: Wave climate study
Milestone 4.2: Experimental design
Milestone 4.3: Tests performance