Learning outcome

General competences

After completing the programme, the students will acquire general competences in:

• Design methods for coastal structures, shore protection, ports, waterways, and other coastal facilities.
• Dredging and disposal solutions for contaminated sediments.
• Design and operation of inland waterways hydraulic structures and riverbanks.
• Coastal hydrodynamics (e.g., waves and currents) and their actions on the coast and man-made interventions, spanning from short (storms) to decadal scales considering the climate-change dimension.
• Physical processes responsible for coastline evolution.
• Data analysis, and synthesis of data and information from different sources with contemporary techniques and technologies.
• Management of planning activities from a local scale to a regional and national scale
• Socio-economical exploitation of the coastal zone (recreational and/vs production activities).
• Teamwork, cross- and inter-disciplinary work, communication (oral and written).
• Social responsibility of business and entrepreneurship.

Knowledge

After completing the programme, the students will have knowledge of:

• The physics of the ocean (currents and waves) and the basic processes occurring in the coastal zone (hydro- and morphodynamics), and their effects on the coast, port and waterways infrastructure.
• Coastal and oceanographic numerical modelling and laboratory modelling techniques.
• Design of coastal structures and shore protection (hard vs soft engineering, engineering with nature)
• Geotechnical aspects related to foundations for port and waterways structures.
• Port planning and operation.
• Environmental issues before and after construction of e.g., a port.
• Coastal vulnerability within a sustainable framework.
• Field campaigns and data treatment to evaluate problematic situations and plan/design solutions.
• Developing beach management strategies for real-world coastal systems.
• Integral coastal management assessing the efficiency of strategies in a global spatial framework from the watershed, river mouth to shoreline evolution and risk assessment for coastal flooding and coastal erosion.
• Understanding the basis behind climate change and its effect on the coast.
• Socio-economic effects and consequences of coastal protection and adaptation strategies, resilience and adaptation to climate changes.
• How to cooperate with administrations and private companies.
• Corporate responsibility, ethics and self-consciousness in the workplace.

Skills

After completing the programme, the students will be able to:

• Analyse and interpret collected field data in order to understand the physical drivers at short, mid and long-time or climatic scales;
• Perform time and frequency domain analysis of MetOcean data to provide operational and design values.
• Quantify natural forcing on the coastline (waves, currents, surges)
• Apply state-of-the-art numerical model for coastal hydro- and morphodynamics for different design purposes (CFD, wave phase-resolving, wave phase-averaging, short term morphodynamics, long term morphodynamics).
• Design coastal interventions and understand and predict the impacts of such interventions.
• Offer alternatives to hard coastal engineering.
• Design navigational infrastructure with resilience and adaptation to climate change in mind.
• Compute the risk, vulnerability and hazards including the decadal (climatic) scale,
• Perform risk management (concepts and techniques).
• Know how to make the stakeholders and community to work together to make a project acceptable and wanted.
• Manage conflicts in the work environment and assess socio-economic and social impacts of different coastal adaptation and protection strategies.