Environmental protection efforts in coastal areas recognise contaminated materials as a critical element of the aquatic ecosystem requiring careful evaluation for their potential remediation. This article considers aspects related to the design of a multi-layer capping for a contaminated coastal area. The area is located just south of the urbanised region of Bari, Puglia Region, along the Adriatic coast of Italy. This area received massive displacement of cement asbestos from residuals of a factory producing concrete pipelines for aqueducts and asbestos boards. The designed reclamation has been proposed in order to allow reuse of the 2.4-km-long coastline for recreational activities. For this purpose, the main objective has been to face aspects related to the problems posed by the design of the adopted capping structure and various constraints related to the natural environment. An extensive numerical study has been carried out to verify the effects of the planned intervention. The local wave climate, wave- and wind-induced circulation, the impact on water quality, and the biological system have been investigated. At present, the intervention is under construction.

The research describes the design aspects related to the large scale physical model experiments conducted within the EU Hydralab III Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, at the Canal d’Investigaciò i Esperimentaciò Marìtima, Laboratori d’Enginyeria Marìtima at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona. The aim of the experimental investigation is to enlarge the knowledge on dune erosion, overwash and breaching processes during storm surges. An innovative ‘composite’ numerical model has been adopted to reach a model test setup valid to observe dune erosion, overwash and breaching. The use of the proposed approach provides a better insight into the physical problems thereby, reducing the uncertainties in selecting the optimum wave characteristics to be reproduced in the flume for a given beach dune geometry.

In the present paper a general longshore transport (LT) model is proposed after a re-calibration of the model originally introduced by Lamberti and Tomasicchio (1997) based on a modified stability number, Ns**, for stone mobility at reshaping or berm breakwaters. Ns** resembles the traditional stability number (Ahrens, 1987; van der Meer, 1988) taking into account the effects of a non-Rayleighian wave height distribution at shallow water (Klopman and Stive, 1989), wave steepness, wave obliquity, and nominal diameter of the units. Nine high-quality data sets from field and laboratory experiments have been considered to extend the validity of the original model for a wider mobility range of the units: from stones to sands. The predictive capability of the proposed model has been verified against the most popular formulae in literature for the LT estimation of not cohesive units at a coastal body. The comparison showed that the model gives a better agreement with the physical data with respect to the other investigated formulae. The proposed transport model presents a main advantage with respect to other formulae: it can represent an engineering tool suitable for a large range of conditions, from sandy beaches till reshaping breakwaters.

The hydrodynamics of the surf zone in front of collapsing coastal dunes are examined. The data was gathered during the HYDRALAB-III funded Transnational Access experiment performed at the CIEM large-scale wave flume. Here, it is presented results of the cross-shore evolution of several flow parameters at four positions. Despiked and band-pass filtered ADV velocity data were used to enable a focus on only the short-wave component. As the waves approach the shore they reduce their (velocity) skewness, but increase their vertical asymmetry. Despite the non-negligible wave reflection, the theoretical wave model of Abreu et al. (2010) was applied to successfully reproduce the measured velocities. Lastly, an estimate of the bed shear stress exerted by the shortwave components is presented.