Bram de Vries

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Project Background

To prevent catastrophes, like the flood of 1953 or the Rhine floods of 1995, the Dutch authorities checks the strength of the water defenses in the Netherlands every five years. The assessment rules for the safety check are provided by the Dutch government. The Rijkswaterstaat programme ``Strength and Loads on Water Defenses (SBW)'' is aimed at establishing new assessment rules for the future assessment of water defenses and is in particular focused on water defenses that can't be accurately assessed with the current rules. The hybrid water defenses, a combination of dunes and hard unerodable structures, fall in this category and still lack reliable assessment rules. In the framework of the SBW programme Rijkswaterstaat had commissioned Deltares to execute a series of pilot experiments on dune erosion near unerodable structures. The main objective was to verify qualitatively the hypothesis that unerodable structures cause an increase in erosion of the dunes next to it. The hypothesis was confirmed by the experiments and the current assessment rules were reviewed.

Objective

The objective of the project is to validate the results of the pilot experiments with the numerical model XBeach.