Continuous dredging and maintenance of maritime and inland waterways are required to ensure safe and competitive navigation. This produces large amounts of sediment, the properties of which depend on the nature of the geological environment of hinterland and anthropogenic impacts. From an environmental point of view, excavated sediments can be polluted by port activity and by the impacts of industry, mining and unregulated communal infrastructure - sewage in the influental hinterland. Potential use of excavated sediments in built environment is limited due to high water content.
This thesis focuses on the legislation for water sediments management and on its current practice in the major European ports, including Port of Koper. In the Port of Koper, dredged sediment is presently pumped as slurry into temporary lagoons where the sedimentation and consolidation processes start. Even after few years of resting, dredged sediment in lagoons remain in liquid consistency. Consequently, these large areas are unsuitable for the development of port infrastructure. Due to this, one of the objectives in this thesis was to assess the influence of chemical additives on the slurry sedimentation and consolidation. Also the influence of chemical additives on filterability of slurry and filter cake resistance were investigated. Standard and advanced (alternative) laboratory tests were carried out to determine behaviors of dredged sediment slurry with the addition of four different chemical additives.
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