Characterization of wind in seaports for load prediction on ships and port infrastructures

Ports are important nodes and facilitate a large portion of the worldwide trade volume via sea and they can be considered in many cases the entry and the exit points of a country’s trade. These areas are particularly exposed to strong wind conditions since they are generally characterized by sudden and strong surface roughness changes (e.g. from flat and open quays to cranes and container stacks and back to open sea). Here, accidents caused by storm winds do not only imply considerable economic losses but also high risks for the workers. Since decades these areas have been expanding to host larger cruise ships, containerships and vessels. Besides the unquestionable and positive impact of port areas on the global economy, the increasing ship size also causes larger wind forces and ship inertia, which render the navigation through the ports even more difficult. Therefore, the characterization of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) winds is of primary importance towards the safety management of ports and waterways. Despite the great strides of Wind and Maritime Engineering communities, the prediction of local-scale wind conditions in such complex environments is still challenging. In this paper on-site measurements and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are used to characterize the wind field at the commercial terminals (i.e. APM and ECT) of the Port of Rotterdam (the Netherlands) for two representative configurations: without (scenario 1) and with (scenario 2) cranes and container stacks.