Sustainable Development of Coastal Areas: Port Expansion with Small Impacts on Estuarine Hydrodynamics and Sediment Transport Pattern

With the expansion of global trade and the growing traffic of increasingly larger ships to meet this demand, the need to expand port infrastructure appears as the main alternative. In this way, dredging operations for the maintenance and deepening of navigation channels, as well as the expansion of evolution basins and berthing wharf areas become fundamental, generating large amounts of material removed from the bottom. Aiming at port expansion based on a sustainable development and minimization of the environmental impacts generated by these operations, it is necessary to seek alternatives for the destination of large volumes of dredged material. A sustainable alternative is to dispose these volumes on land in order to expand coastal areas (such as fattening beaches) and mooring pier areas. The present work presents a numerical modeling case study using the TELEMAC-3D model coupled to the suspended sediment module SEDI-3D. As an alternative, an existing island (Ilha do Terrapleno) will receive material dredged from the access channel to the Port of Rio Grande (southern Brazil) and will have its mooring area expanded. The study evaluated the impact that this change in the island’s configuration would generate on the hydrodynamics and on the deposition patterns of fine suspended sediments in its surroundings and in the adjacent navigation channel. Results indicated that in the navigation channel adjacent to Ilha do Terrapleno, the new configuration promoted changes in the hydrodynamics with a decrease in the mean current velocity around the island and throughout the water column, mainly in the north and central portions of the channel. This difference decreased towards the southern portion of the channel. This change in local hydrodynamics promoted small changes in the suspended sediment deposition patterns and in the bottom evolution. Thus, the sustainable expansion of the Port of Rio Grande operational capacity considering the creation of 3600 m of berthing wharf areas and minimum environmental impact proved viable when considering the Ilha do Terrapleno proposed configuration. Furthermore, this idea offers the possibility to dispose in land 722,910 m³ of dredged material, a sustainable alternative to the Port of Rio Grande development, and an inspiration for the sustainable development of other ports worldwide.