Wouter Jan Klerk

Wouter Jan Klerk
Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Hydraulic Engineering

Master of Science Civil Engineering

About

34
Publications
8,466
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
278
Citations

Publications

Publications (34)
Article
Full-text available
The condition of flood defence revetments is influenced by many different degradation processes such as animal burrowing, rutting and growth of weeds. Many of these processes are shock-based rather than progressive continuous. As shocks can cause a drop in performance, this means that the condition of a revetment can suddenly decrease, meaning that...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Reliability-based design of levee systems requires proper treatment of spatial variability in reliability analysis. In practice, this is often dealt with by standardized factors that represent the typical spatial variability. Such factors are then used to upscale cross-sectional reliability to system reliability. As for instance choices in schemati...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we aim to identify factors affecting susceptibility to drought-induced cracking in levees and use them to build a machine learning model that can identify crack-prone levees on a regional scale. By considering the key relationship between the size of cracks and the moisture content, we observed that low moisture contents act as an im...
Article
Full-text available
Prioritisation of flood defence maintenance is typically based on visual inspection. However, literature shows that the Probability of Detection (PoD) of visual inspection can vary significantly. Here we investigate the PoD for visual inspections of flood defence structures, the consistency of damage classification, and the influence of different v...
Article
EU Member States invest some €2.5 billion per year in flood protection, yet flood damages continue to increase. A new approach to the planning, design and management of flood protection assets is needed to ensure risks are better managed and asset management is aligned with broader socio-economic policies and supporting governance systems. This pap...
Article
Full-text available
Spatial variability and limited measurements often result in low reliability estimates of geotechnical failure modes of dikes (i.e., earthen flood defences). Required dike reinforcements are usually not executed within a few years after inception, which enables efforts to improve reliability estimates by reducing uncertainty. Often decision makers...
Article
Full-text available
North Sea Region countries depend heavily on flood protection infrastructure, such as dikes, dams, sluices and flood gates. Knowledge on where, when and how much to invest to ensure functioning is of crucial importance for asset owners and operators. This requires asset management approaches that are adaptable, respond to feedback and function with...
Article
Full-text available
Uncertainties about climate change consequences, changing societal requirements and system complexity require flood protection asset managers to continuously evaluate their asset management policies and practice to manage risk and improve the resilience of their assets. However, there are many challenges in doing this, with asset operators often fa...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change and deterioration require a continuous effort to reinforce flood defences and meet reliability requirements. To efficiently upgrade flood defence systems, insight in costs and benefits of measures at a system level is required throughout the process of planning and design. Due to the size of flood defence systems the number of possib...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Revetments protect flood defences against erosion from waves and currents. At several coastal dikes in the Netherlands asphalt has been used as a revetment material for protection against waves. Asphalt concrete revetments can degrade due to several shock-based and continuous degradation processes, for instance wave impacts, uneven settlements, cra...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many flood defences in the Netherlands will have to be reinforced in the coming decades. Many dikes do not fulfill the safety standard due to geotechnical failure modes, largely due to epistemic, reducible uncertainties.. The Value of Information is a measure to indicate beforehand whether an investment towards reducing epistemic uncertainty is eco...
Article
Full-text available
One of the most rapidly emerging measures in infrastructure asset management is Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), which aims at reducing uncertainty in structural performance by using monitoring equipment. As earthen flood defence structures typically have large strength uncertainties, such techniques can be particularly promising. However, insig...
Article
Full-text available
To make informed flood risk management (FRM) decisions in large protected river systems, flood risk and hazard analyses should include the potential for dike breaching. ‘Load interdependency’ analyses attempt to include the system-wide effects of dike breaching while accounting for the uncertainty of both river loads and dike fragility. The intensi...
Article
In risk analysis of riverine flood defence systems, sections of flood defences are often considered separately, herewith ignoring their interdependence, e.g. due to the hydraulic response following dike breaches in the system. In previous studies it has been found that such interdependence can have a significant influence on flood risk estimates an...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
For asset management of flood defences a pivotal aspect is the quality and accessibility of available data and information. In the management of flood defences in The Netherlands, safety assessments are conducted every twelve years. To assure the quality and consistency of these safety assessments, flood defence engineers have to make use of a comp...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In The Netherlands, inspection and maintenance are essential for maintaining stringent flood protection standards. Flood defences are assessed every 12 years to ensure they meet their risk-based safety standards, which are given as legally-binding maximum failure probabilities. Between assessments, flood defence managers are subject to risk-mainten...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Since 2017 Dutch flood protection standards are defined as target flood probabilities that all primary flood defences have to comply with by 2050. Explicitly accounting for uncertainties in probability distributions of load and resistance is an integral part of estimating the actual flood probability. Based on such estimates, many flood defences wi...
Article
Full-text available
This article highlights recent developments in flood risk management in the Netherlands and presents approaches for reliability analysis and asset management for flood defences and hydraulic infrastructure. The functioning of this infrastructure is of great importance for the country as large parts of it are prone to flooding. Based on a nationwide...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents a framework for life-cycle management of public infrastructure. Compared to for instance life-cycle management for industrial applications, public infrastructures offer some specific challenges. This framework aims to capture these. It is based on the different life-cycle stages and considers three decision levels: strategic dec...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In recent years there has been an increasing focus on life-cycle and asset management as a means of managing systems of ageing infrastructure. To accurately assess performance, structural health mon-itoring can be an important means. In this paper a tool is presented which assesses the costs and benefits of structural health monitoring in life-cycl...
Article
Full-text available
The Netherlands is a low-lying coastal area and therefore threatened by both extreme river discharges from the Meuse and Rhine rivers and storm surges along the North Sea coastline. To date, in most flood risk analyses these two hazardous phenomena are considered independent. However, if there were a dependence between high sea water levels and ext...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the Netherlands the potential of societal disruption by floods plays an important role in the discussion on flood risk management strategies. One of the indicators to assess societal disruption is societal flood risk. Societal flood risk is related to the probability of many fatalities during a single event. In deltas protected by flood defences...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the Netherlands, flood risk analysis is usually carried out for a location, without considering potential flood defence failures in upstream areas. This may result in significant over-or underestimation of flood risks. The effect of upstream failures on failure probabilities and flood risks in other areas is called load interdependence of flood...

Network

Cited By