Rehabilitation of highly protected beaches by using environment-friendly structures

In the last few years, environmental impact has been one of the most discussed topics in Coastal Engineering. Actually, conferences on subjects like “soft shore protection” or “environment friendly-structures” have been held all over the world. However, there is still not a general agreement on what environment-friendly means for a coastal protection structure. In this work we try to give a better clarification of this subject by showing some relatively new coastal protection structures that can be considered environment-friendly. Results from laboratory experiments, numerical simulations and field experiments are reported. Concerning Low-Crested Structures (LCSs), laboratory experiments on the piling-up phenomenon are presented. Numerical simulations of flow field around a submerged groin and the morphodynamics measured by field monitoring are discussed. Finally, two case studies of gravel nourishment and their effectiveness are described.