Giant Geotextile Tube Applied to the Temporary Cofferdam Reclamation Construction for a New-Build Container Base at Harbor in Taiwan

Abstract

Kaohsiung Harbor is the largest international commercial port in southern Taiwan and also the largest container exporting centre in Taiwan. In response to the growing trend of large-scale container ships in the international shipping and to strengthen the competitiveness of the Kaohsiung Container Hub port in the Asia-Pacific, a new container base in the hinterland of the southern tip of Kaohsiung Harbor is built. As this new land-reclaimed container base will be completed in phases over a period of years, a temporary cofferdam is needed after the 1st phase of reclaimed work (the 1st phase of the reclaimed area is 43 ha and the total area is 162 ha). Because of the deep water (4–5 m deep after dredging), it is recommended to enlarge the size of single geotextile tube to assure the stability of cofferdam and to achieve the goal of reducing the usage of geotextile tubes.

The final proposal is to fill hydraulically the giant geotextile tube (here used is ACETube^®) with special safeguard of it during the filling process, and stacking in a 2+1 pyramid shape to form a designed cofferdam dimension of more than 7.5 m high, 32 m wide base and total structure length of 700 m. Before filling, the maximum circumference of each ACETube^® is 36 m with a length of 34.5 m, and the dimensions of a single ACETube^® after filling can reach 4 m high and 16 m wide. In this project, it successfully overcomes the construction difficulty of the 4 m underwater filling procedures of the giant geotextile tube. The use of this giant geotextile tube underwater prevents the cofferdam erosion caused by wave and tide and enhances the stability of the cofferdam to resist the heavy duty work at the backfill area.