Multibeam sonar and laser inspection, Port of Krefeld

Port of Krefeld is the fourth largest port in North Rhine-Westphalia handling way over 3 million tons of goods in a year. The port’s motto is “Exploiting potential”, efficiency and customer-friendliness being important values. One essential factor to achieve those values is the good condition of the port infrastructure. In Germany the port authorities are also obligated by law to perform inspections of port infrastructure making sure it meets the demands of increasing transportation. The port wanted to check the structures’ condition by inspecting both the vertical structures below and above water level as well as topography of the river bed near the structures. The inspection included areas the port considered to be the most critical to inspect; about 4 kilometers of port structures and one historical bridge.

Detailed view of the structures as the baseline for predictive maintenance

The field work was carried out in four days. Port of Krefeld received the post-processed point cloud data, full report of the inspection with licensed inspector’s observations and the whole 3D data easily accessible in Gisgro online system. Our multibeam sonar and laser inspection is the most efficient way to gather detailed data on wide areas and to see where to target the maintenance efforts first. Port of Krefeld uses the digitized version of the infrastructure as the database of overall port structure condition assessment. Also when there’s a need for monitoring the areas (e.g. to detect weathering of the concrete or sediment drifts) in the long run with new inspections, the 3D data sets can be compared to receive an accurate information of the possible changes.

We were perfectly satisfied. The results of the inspection were very good and interesting.

Ralf Schopp, Head of Port Operations, Hafen Krefeld

Project was implemented by VRT's inspections business area which is part of Sitowise since December 2021. Read more about the acquire.