Effects of the frontal deepening of quay wall for the East Port of Port Said

During the last two decades, new container ship generations had come into service, as a result of the huge growth of container trade. New container ships with larger dimensions may lead to the need to develop many of container terminals by either just deepening in front of quay walls or by deepening and replacing existing quay cranes with ones of higher capacities. In Port Said area there are several ports that need to keep pace with the tremendous progress in ship sizes. One of these ports is the Port Said East Port container terminal located on the Mediterranean Sea to the north of Egypt. The diaphragm wall which services as a berthing structure in this port is one of the deepest diaphragm wall structures built in soft clay, 62.5m deep below lowest astronomical tide (LAT). The existing water depth in the front of the quay wall is 18 m. This paper describes a finite element approach for analyzing the behavior of the quay wall under development scenarios using static calculation only. The finite element programs PLAXIS 2D Version 8.2 and PLAXIS 3D Version 1.6 have been used to analyze the performance of the structural elements, soil and the overall stability under deepening and the increase of crane wheels loads to accommodate the expected future ship sizes. The results showed that the diaphragm quay wall can resist safely 4 m deepening in front of the quay wall considering the existing crane loads. While, the results showed that width of cracks limitation will restrict increasing quay cranes loads