Towards a mobile monitoring tool for coastal structures inspection: the Ericeira rubble-mound breakwater test case

Abstract

Rubble mound breakwaters (RMB) are the most common maritime structures in Portugal. Their main goal is to reduce the action of waves on the sheltered area of the structure to achieve safety conditions for ships, people and harbour activities. To account and define the need for maintenance or repair works on such structures, it is necessary to evaluate its evolution along its expected lifetime. To predict damages that may occur in those structures and evaluate its importance in terms of structural safety and functionality, it is therefore of utmost importance to follow a monitoring program on such structures. For that purpose, a monitoring mobile tool to be used onsite by the observer would be very useful, adding in this way more efficiency to the existing traditional monitoring techniques used nowadays at LNEC, where visual, systematic, observations are made to attain relevant qualitative evaluation of those structures. Hence, a responsive WebGIS system was developed (Maia et al., 2017) for assisting the observation campaigns, enabling the introduction of photos and videos, their accurate georeferencing, the automatic evaluation of the current, and evolutive, structural state of the structure, and also the checking of physical characteristics of the structure and materials. Besides briefly describing the monitoring tool, this paper focuses primarily on demonstrating its application to a real case scenario of an inspection campaign to the RMB of Ericeira,Portugal, on the 20th of April 2017.