Port and coastal protection from wave action stands as one of the main functional features of maritime works. Breakwaters, as main functional elements in most marine works, play a fundamental role both in terms of design and performance in one hand, and on the other hand in terms of costs, management complexity, and environmental and socioeconomic impacts.
In that sense, sustainability involving not only commissioning but operation and conservation represents a real challenge and a field for technical and managing advance. Indeed, operation and maintenance can be improved from the scope of sustainability, even addressing the objectives drawn by Agenda 2030. Taking a step further, sustainable development of marine works encompasses both an efficient yet minimum impact design, construction and maintenance/repair/expansion strategies in which assessment of structural resilience and damage evolution is a key factor.
Sustainable management of maritime structures can be accomplished through a formal and comprehensive methodology in terms of thermo-economic criteria applying EMergy-Budget analysis, which complements ENergy-budget (mechanical, efficiency) and EXergy-budget (thermodynamics, eversibility) analysis. Emergy (embodied energy) can be defined as the amount of a primary energy source (usually solar radiation) which is required to produce an utterly transformed amount of energy to be used in a process, as a complementary focusing to exergy balance, which focuses on the amount of reversible work which is available over subsequent stages in a production chain.
Indeed, emergy analysis allows to build a complete integrated project balance in which energetic, exergetic and economic factors from design stage to the implementation, starting-up, service life and final dismantling if required, are considered. Sustainability might be seen as a wide or imprecise concept from a general point of view. However, emergy and exergy analysis, formally involved in the analysis of sustainability, provide with precise budgets deduced from mechanical, energetic, and thermodynamic variables, economic descriptors of activities, supplies and fluxes involved in different stages of the project. From that basis, emergy and exergy indexes of sustainability, renewability and greenhouse emissions are calculated, leading to unambiguous estimation of project impacts.
The main goal in this project is to assess the sustainability of a breakwater over its useful life, namely operation, repair, maintenance and dismantling, in terms of economic activity and sustainability, by applying an emergy analysis, even analyzing the improvement in sustainability specially focusing on service life and maintenance/repair/enlargement stages. The innovation in this proposal is the formal implementation of emergy analysis to port operation and maintenance, and more specifically to breakwaters as key functional structures, with the objective of developing strategies for maintenance and repair in which sustainability is tracked and improved with confidence and in terms of economic and production indicators, directly related to economic activities, emissions and impacts on the biosphere.
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
Emergy Diagrams for Breakwater Lifecycle Stages
To obtain the emergy diagrams for the maintenance, repair, and dismantling stages of a mound breakwater.
Quantification of Energy and Emergy Flows
To quantify the energy and emergy flows in terms of renewable (R), non-renewable (N), material, equipment, human services from the economy (F), yield of the process (Y), and pollutant emissions (C) involved in the obtained diagrams.
Emergy-Based Sustainability Indicators
Emergy-Based Sustainability Indicators Description: To obtain the emergy-based indicators for a breakwater project over its useful life, including emergy-based sustainability, environmental load, and percentage of renewability indicators.
Breakwater Failure Evolution Assessment
To incorporate a rigorous method of assessing breakwater failure evolution into the emergy analysis during the repair and maintenance stages.
Results Dissemination and Open Source Publishing
To disseminate and transfer results through the production of open-source publications, design and guideline handbooks, and codes.