Turning fines and soft (dredge) sediments (also so-called unsuitable) to a useful
resource for climate resiliency (e.g. clay for dikes), nature development (e.g. nature
islands), or sustainable human activities (e.g. land reclamation or tailings basin
closure) is a critical opportunity for sustainable development, in the Netherlands
and internationally (as demonstrated by ongoing projects such as Markerwadden,
Kleirijperij, Surricates).
This project focuses on developing a new constitutive model to assess stability and
failure of soft (dredge or mine tailings) sediment deposits which undergo very large
(fluid-like) deformation. If stable, these deposits will become the substrate for civil
infrastructure (e.g. ports or land reclamation) or nature (e.g. wetlands, islands,
green areas).
Together with academic, engineering and contractor partners, this project will build
upon state-of-the-art international knowledge and experience to:
– Develop a new constitutive model to appropriately describe the behavior
of soft sediments undergo large deformation, requiring a systematic/critical
literature study as well as developing new theoretical knowledge;
– Embed it into a numerical model that allows for large deformation (i.e.
MPM-Anoura3D); thus, improving the MPM model to a large extend for such
complex applications under discussion;
– Investigate the performance of MPM model equipped with the new
constitutive model against a commercial model (e.g. FLAC) on a laboratory
experiment recently executed in Canada, as an attempt to proof the concept and to
evaluate the readiness of the new model for the future research and commercial
projects in the field of beneficial reuse of soft (unsuitable) sediments.

Bekijk het project