Wave and current data bolster nature-based Dutch flood defense Houtribdijk

Specialists from the EcoShape knowledge consortium initially conducted extensive research in a test area to see how the sand behaved.

Rijkswaterstaat forms part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, handling the design, construction, management and maintenance of infrastructure facilities in the Netherlands. A research and monitoring program now running for the full, scaled-up solution is designed to ensure experience gained so far regarding the reinforcement of the Houtribdijk can be applied in the future. This program is being led by Rijkswaterstaat in collaboration with Delft University of Technology.

“The knowledge that we are gaining here will be very useful in the Netherlands and beyond,” Meuldijk says.

“Nortek was selected by means of a public tender procedure by the Dutch authorities, and was finally chosen because they offered the best quality for an acceptable price. Nortek suggested various additional elements of the total setup that led to a more robust and reliable monitoring system”, says Rinse Wilmink, Project Manager and Advisor on coastal flood risk management and morphology at Rijkswaterstaat.

Accuracy was of course vital, but at the same time energy consumption needed to be low, given that the instrument arrays were mounted on small platforms in shallow water, powered only by small solar panels.

“Low energy consumption was a key requirement, and our instruments consume very little power, even when working continuously”, says Rikke van der Grinten, Sales Engineer at Nortek.

Nortek was also asked to devise the telemetry system for data transfer from the instruments. Creating the capability to reliably transfer and present up to 1 GB a day of data was challenging, both technologically and in terms of the time available.

The client required Nortek to work with diverse instruments from multiple manufacturers. All of these instruments had to be integrated into one functioning system. This was a complex task. It even made it more challenging because Nortek’s engineers needed to get the job done in just two months, including the Christmas of 2018.