Appraisal of historical maritime structures at Clydebank, Scotland

Abstract

The site at Queens Quay, Clydebank, features maritime structures built (most recently) in 1954, 62 years ago. The land site is currently being developed for commercial and residential purposes and the maritime structures are being appraised to meet a further 60-year design life. The structures comprise a suspended concrete deck supported on driven concrete piles, which forms the basin deck structure. Within the concrete structure, a sheet pile wall retains soil from approximately +1·5 m chart datum (CD) to a historical dredged depth of around −8·0 m CD. The unique arrangement of the structure and the scant records have demanded challenging investigative engineering work to appraise the structure and determine whether remedial work is required. This paper describes the activities that were carried out to appraise the structures: desktop study, diver inspections, archive researching, preliminary structural assessments, finite-element analyses and design concept solutions.