Quantitative assessment of the shoreline protection performance of geotextile sandbags at an in-situ coastal experimental station

The coast of China is periodically impacted by tropical cyclones and storm surges, and has experienced significant coastal erosion problems. Traditional “hard engineering” coastal protection measures used to protect Chinese sandy coasts from storm erosion are found to be expensive and less environmental and even make sandy beach disappearing. In this study, geotextile system as a more flexible material was developed and qualitatively compared with the traditional coastal protection measures. An in-situ permanent revetment was applied with durable geotextile sandbags on the coast of Chudao in China from October 2018 to October 2020, and it was designed for three different testing segments to optimize the stability and construction cost of geotextile sandbags. The field surveys were carried out to collect the in-situ data on beach profiles, wave dynamics, material durability, and sandbag revetment stability. In analyzing the two-year field data collected, it is found that the testing segment-2 wrapped with sheet of plastic geogrids is the most effective of the three testing segments in terms of their coat, structural stability and material durability, and that both the slope of the seabed and the design thickness of geotextile sandbag are the dominate factors responsible for the failure of sandbag structures.