River Engineering

Hydraulic and morphological factors play a key role in the maintenance and improvement of federal waterways and are also relevant for attaining transport and ecological goals. One focus is on river training to provide reliable navigation channel depths, for instance by building groynes or longitudinal structures, or by locally stabilising the river bed. Another important topic is redesigning riparian zones and creating side arms to provide ideal flow conditions and a diversity of bank and bottom designs.

The measures that we develop and monitor primarily involve the design, ecological optimisation and maintenance of control structures and banks; fairway maintenance, including in particular the removal of sills; and optimised sediment management to prevent ongoing bed erosion. We develop concepts and measures to improve the transport capacity and ecology of waterways.

Reconciling the goals set for our transport systems with ecological demands is a major challenge. Meeting this challenge and providing detailed and reliable predictions of the impact of river engineering measures requires the BAW to perform extraordinarily broad and in-depth investigations. For the analysis, evaluation and planning of measures, the BAW relies not only on the results of field measurements but employs large-scale numerical models designed for long-term application, which cover reaches of several hundred kilometres and forecast horizons of up to 50 years. Additional insights and valuable comparative data are provided by physical models and so-called hybrid modelling, i.e. running different model types together.