Site Selection And Numerical Simulation Of Wave Characteristics For Deep Sea Port In Myanmar

Maritime transport is a major transportation mode of international trade among other modes of transport.In the Republic of the Union of Myanmar(Burma),water transportation served as one of the most important modes of transport for country's exports and imports.To get better understanding about real situation of maritime transport and logistics in Myanmar;current condition of existing ports,expansion and on-going projects,future port development plans are described successively.The border trades with neighboring countries and logistics corridors crossing Myanmar are also presented.One of the main purposes of this study is to build up a comprehensive picture of maritime transport and logistics,in addition to border trade between ASEAN and Myanmar.It will help for academic researchers,decision makers,and stakeholders for national planning as well as for the local and foreign investors to recognize current situation of maritime transport and logistics in Myanmar.The Port of Yangon is major port of Myanmar and it handles more than 90%of international maritime trade.The recent situation of Yangon Port,including its capacity,navigation condition,and channel constricts etc.are illustrated detailed.The growth of container volumes during the last decades and the capacity constraints encountered byYangon Port including Thilawa port area indicated that it is an urgent need to expand existing port and to construct new deep seaports in the maritime business.There are some potential sites for deep sea port project along Myanmar coastline.The most suitable site for deep sea ports are proposed based on influenced factors such as geopolitical interests,commercial considerations,corridor developments,influence of neighboring countries,development of road,rail and/or pipeline connections to the key ports etc.The proposed sites are ranked by Analytical Hierarchy Process(AHP)depending on the various site selection criteria.The purpose is to provide the government plan for the selection of deep sea port sites for regional development in Myanmar.The main function of seaports is to ensure safety for seagoing vessels entering,operating in and leaving off the seaport.Although it may include other components such as terminal facilities and distribution structures,the safety of the berthing area for loading/unloading of cargoes is critical in the overall operations of the port facility.Moreover,the location and alignment of elements such as entrance,approach channel,tuining basin,breakwater,wharves,jetties and docks etc.are very important to ensure easy maneuverability and additional navigation facilities.The intensity of external forces,especially wind and wave action,is very important for the positioning of those various elements.Therefore,an important component of most coastal and ocean engineering projects is an accurate assessment of the wave climate at the project site.Careful site selection may reduce the potentially hazardous environmental impacts and the cost of mitigation and/or restoration,as well as lessen public controversy.Hence,port planners seek to determine the best locations for channels,harbours and canals to protect from environmental factors.Due to the absence of field data,numerical simulation becomes more importance to obtain realistic characteristics of waves for coastal structures and marine operation.As a result of initiation of powerful computers and development of several numerical techniques,solving coastal problems using numerical models are found to be very reliable,cost effective and time saving tools.This leads to do research works on numerical models for wave predictions at interested areas,specifically where in-situ observations and measured wave data are lack.Physical modeling studies are expensive and time demanding,which poses limitations on the number of cases to be tested.For example,the scale of the model may not be sufficiently large to represent all the features of the prototype.Besides the scale,wave patterns in the laboratory model may be modified by the boundaries of the tank.Thus,numerical wave propagation models seem to be the most suitable tools for analysis and/or optimization of wave characteristics.Numerical models are used to express the physical concepts of the phenomena for hindcasting and forecasting of wave parameters that help in the design of the coastal structures.Waves propagating from deep water to coastal shallow water are mainly affected by the bottom topography,resulting in physical processes such as wave refraction,shoaling,diffraction and reflection,etc.,.The study of these processes is important in coastalengineering due to their significant impact depends on wave parameters.Wave penetration inside harbours has been one the main issues that port planners and engineers have to deal with in recent years.Nearshore wave conditions are normally determined from deep-water conditions because long-term wave data are usually unavailable for most project sites.These offshore wave characteristics have to be transformed to project site taking into account the physical phenomena by using a variety of methods,which involve empirical and numerical solutions.The different models are based on different assumptions,which limit the types of problems to which they can be applied.Therefore one or more than one type of model should be selected to make the best or most efficient representation of the problem being considered.Realistic wind wave condition in a coastal area,and in and around harbour can be obtained by predicting the wind wave conditions in a large area where the waves are generated.In this extensive area,the prediction is practically only possible in a phase-averaged sense.Therefore,phase-averaged model SWAN was used and it accounts for diffraction only approximately.Diffraction is an important factor in the determination of the distribution of wave energy within a harbor,and therefore is of importance in harbor design.For investigating complex wave transformation problems over small regions,phase resolving model,Boussinesq Wave model,BOUSS was used to compute specific effects.It is ideally suited for applications where reflection,diffraction,and/or nonlinear interactions are significant such as near coastal inlets and harbours.In the viewpoint of port operation,the relationship between ship motion and cargo handling works as well falls in the judgment of harbour serenity.Thus establishing statistics of the wave climate outside the harbour and transforming it to inner harbour is a fundamental task.The behavior of a wave depends on the relation between the wave's size and the depth of water through which it is moving.In this research,detailed characteristics of wave parameters were determined by two numerical wave models.The deep water waves were transformed to harbour front by using the results from nested SWAN run and waves entering into inner harbour were estimated by using Boussinesq-type equations(BOUSS).In such applications each model is used to compute specific effects,where the phase-resolving models are used to compute the effects of physical processes,and while the phase-averaged models are used to compute the effects of local wave generation for selected deep sea port sites in Myanmar.One of the purposes of this research is to predict the wave characteristics for coastal regions of Myanmar by using a third-generation numerical wave model SWAN(Simulating WAves Nearshore).The first simulation was carried out the generation of waves by a constant wind filed blowing over a fetch limited area.The results are compared with empirical formulae for validation.The simulated wave parameters were well agreed with the results from empirical equations.And then,further numerical simulations were carried out with actual wind field for the duration of average maximun wind speed in the Bay of Bengal in monsoon season.The calculated results were compared with the ECMWF(European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts)ERA-Interim reanalysis data sets.The nearshore wave characteristics for future port development areas along Myanmar coastline were predicted.Nearshore wave conditions are normally determined from deep-water conditions because long-term wave data are usually unavailable for most project sites.These offshore wave characteristics have to be transformed to project site taking into account the effects of wind-wave generation,shoaling/refraction over seabed topography,energy dissipation due to wave breaking and bottom friction,wave reflection/diffraction near structures,nonlinear wave-wave interactions,and wave interaction with current fields.The nested simulation of SWAN is proposed to calculate wave parameters for smaller areas within larger domain.The offshore wave characteristics could be transformed to nearshore wave conditions by using proposed method.The main purpose of nesting is to get better and more accurate results for smaller area with smaller time step.Wave penetration inside harbours basin has been one the main issues that port planners and engineers have to deal with in recent years.Realistic wind wave condition in a coastal area,and inside and around harbour can be obtained by predicting the wind wave conditions in a large area where the waves are generated.In this extensive area,the prediction is practically only possible in a phase-averaged sense.To determine the difference of wave parameters from both numerical models,phase-averaged model SWAN and phase-resolving model,Boussinesq Wave Model,using Boussinesq-type equations(BOUSS)were used in small scale area in and around harbor.The presented approach can be used to predict realistic wave penetration inside harbours particularly for selected deep sea port in Myanmar.From their results,phase-resolving models would be used in small scale area and more preferred because of their ability to calculate accurately diffraction,shoaling,refractions and nonlinearity,especially for calculating specific processes inside harbour basin and around harbours.