HR Wallingford offers a range of services for ports, harbours and marine terminals, from the review and development of existing infrastructure to site selection and evaluation of options for new facilities. We help our clients to plan future port development, optimise the design of port infrastructure and obtain the necessary licensing and consents.
Port and terminal planning
We help develop strategic plans for ports and terminals worldwide. The full range of technical, economic, operational and environmental issues must be considered to ensure future viability.
Waves, currents, sediments and water quality
We use desk techniques and state of the art computational and physical modelling tools to understand these aspects and optimise the design. We predict wave and currents to assess ship handling and mooring design, navigation, breakwater design, sedimentation, coastal impacts and water quality.
Navigation
Port design and ship operations are considered in parallel to ensure that the design vessels will operate safely and efficiently. This is particularly important where increasing ship size and scale of operations mean that decisions on port and channel redesign and redefinition of optimal environmental limits are needed. Following preliminary desk studies, we use our real time bridge and tug simulators to investigate options and verify proposed port and channel layouts.
Dredging channel optimisation
Optimisation of dredge areas can deliver significant capital and operational savings. We look at navigation together with our wave, current and sediment transport models to assess depositional rates, optimise depths, side slopes and channel widths.
Dredging and disposal
The design of dredging works, operational problems and the disposal of dredge material require short and long term predictions to ensure compliance with environmental constraints and licences. We use numerical models to design and optimise channels and ensure suspended material concentrations from the dredge process can be quantified and mitigated if needed.
Coastal impact
Any shoreline development requires consideration of its impact on the coastal regime and evolution. HR Wallingford uses a range of computational and physical modelling resources to ensure these impacts are assessed.
Design
Assessing and optimising the performance of harbour and protective structures is an integral aspect of port design. HR Wallingford uses desk study, computational modelling and physical modelling to ensure that any structure is fully optimised while continuing to offer adequate protection and performance within economical and environmental constraints.
Environmental impacts
Adequate assessment and mitigation of environmental impacts is key to successful development and operation of any port development. We undertake:
- legislation reviews to ensure compliance with standards
- scoping, consultation and ongoing liaison with consenting authorities and consultees to deliver environmental approvals and licences
- preparation of environmental scoping and statement documents
- environmental impact assessment (EIA)
- modelling for new developments
- flood risk assessments
- evaluation of dredging and disposal impacts on adjacent coastal areas and on marine and coastal habitats
- develop, specify and manage monitoring and mitigation plans in compliance with the regulatory environment.
