Engineered to your structure. Bespoke fabric formwork, pump-filled with concrete underwater. Thin against quay walls, formed around piles at jetties. By Proserve, in partnership with HUESKER, in service across 30+ ports worldwide.
200 mm typical, up to 7× thinner than the equivalent rock armour section.
Pump-filled to any geometry, on any slope.
Proven to 12.5 m/s jet flow.
Europe, Americas, Africa & Asia
Proserve marine construction
HUESKER partnership
Largest install · Al Faw, Iraq
This page covers the system in general terms. Each structure type has its own page with the sections, joints and installation detail.
Container, bulk, cruise & naval
Vertical retaining structures where propeller and thruster wash erodes the bed at the wall, undermining bearing capacity and berth depth. A thin, sealed concrete slab against the wall stops the scour at source.
Open piled structures with sloped seabed
Open piled structures whose slopes take propeller wash and wave action together, where modern propulsion now demands uneconomical rock sizes. The mattress is installed by divers beneath the completed deck, formed and sealed around the piles.
A 200 mm mattress laid directly over the existing rock armour increased operational depth at the berth, without removing what was already there.
New container terminal specified for the largest vessels afloat, 20,000 TEU ships that couldn’t previously berth in Israel. A continuous 300 mm slab, 850 m along the quay and 39 m wide, seals the foundation against propeller wash and bow-thruster forces at −17.3 m. No joints to scour, no rock armour to dredge for.
Mattress installed in parallel with the main jetty build, under the deck, around the piles, without contractor coordination delays.
Largest single concrete-mattress install in our history. At 200 mm thickness, the protection used a fraction of the rock armour an equivalent specification would have demanded.
1.0-1.5 m thick · individual units
200 mm · continuous interlocked slab
7× thinner · same protection
The equivalent rock-armour section for Al Faw needed 1.8 m of armour, 1.0 m of underlayer and 0.8 m of filter, 3.6 m total, 432,000 m³ across the protected area. The concrete mattress did the same job at 220 mm, 26,400 m³. Less dredging, less wall, less embodied carbon, faster install.
Less material
Saved at Al Faw
Protected area
Step 01
A woven polyester envelope is fabricated on land to the exact geometry of the berth, pile clusters, sloped seabeds, edge details. Divers lower it to the seabed and zip it to neighbouring panels.
Step 02
A fluid micro-concrete is pumped from the quay or deck through filler sleeves. The porous fabric retains the sand and cement while excess water passes through, no marine plant, no batching at the seabed.
Step 03
Concrete cures inside the envelope as a 200 mm slab. Adjacent panels lock at the edges into one continuous concrete apron, hydraulic loads spread across the whole protection area.
A concrete bolster at the quay-wall base, or the fabric envelope wrapped tight around each pile, no gap for flow to bypass the apron.
The envelope is pump-filled with high-fluidity concrete until every cell reaches design thickness, full fill is what resists propeller suction and uplift.
Adjacent panels connect via ball-and-socket shear joints, zipped underwater. Once cured, the apron behaves as one interlocked slab.
Embedded trench, rock falling apron, hinged edge or clay-bolster detail, the seaward edge is sealed against the under-flow path that defeats rock-armour systems.
Hydrodynamic loading on berth beds, studied and tested at full scale
15+ papers in PIANC, ASCE and ICE proceedings, authored by Martin Hawkswood
Contributed to advancing the methods the industry designs berth scour protection to
PIANC
PIANC
ICE
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Berth scour is the erosion of the seabed at a berth, caused by ship propellers, bow thrusters, azipods and high-speed ferry jets, together with waves and currents.
It lowers the seabed beside quay walls and around piles, undermining the structure’s foundations. Scour holes up to 9 m deep have been recorded at fast-ferry berths, and modern vessels with more powerful propulsion have made the problem worse worldwide.
Propeller and thruster scour is stopped by covering the seabed with an in situ concrete mattress, a continuous concrete apron sealed against the quay wall, piles and edge details, designed for jet velocities up to 12.5 m/s.
The mattress protects the zone where propellers, bow thrusters, azipods and ferry jets strike the bed. Design velocities are always confirmed by project-specific hydrodynamic and geotechnical assessment.
At modern berths, often yes. An in situ concrete mattress can be up to seven times thinner than equivalent rock armour, and forms one continuous apron rather than relying on individual stones staying stable under propeller flow.
The thin profile preserves navigable depth and can avoid deeper walls and extra dredging. Rock armour still suits some sites, but for today’s vessels the required stone sizes are often impractical to source, place and maintain.
Berth scour protection is designed from hydrodynamic loads, vessel type, propeller and thruster action, seabed conditions and expected scour depth, to international guidance including PIANC Report 180.
Proserve designs protection, or supports the client’s designer, using physical model testing and its own research papers presented to PIANC world congresses. Good design also covers joints, pile seals, edge restraint and protection against under-scour, not flow velocity alone.
In most cases yes. Divers place the fabric formwork and it is pump-filled from the quayside, so no marine plant is needed and the work can be phased around vessel movements.
The apron is installed in sections and connected as work proceeds, so the team can pause and restart between vessel visits, and a trained dive team typically installs 125 to 300 m² per day. Whether a berth can stay fully operational depends on the vessel schedule and the dive safety case, so it is planned with the port and the contractor.
In most cases yes. Divers place the fabric formwork and it is pump-filled from the quayside, so no marine plant is needed and the work can be phased around vessel movements.
The apron is installed in sections and connected as work proceeds, so the team can pause and restart between vessel visits, and a trained dive team typically installs 125 to 300 m² per day. Whether a berth can stay fully operational depends on the vessel schedule and the dive safety case, so it is planned with the port and the contractor.
It depends on the site, and rock armour is often the cheaper answer. Where suitable rock is locally available and there is room for a graded section, rock is hard to beat on material cost alone.
The comparison changes when rock has to be imported, sized large for modern propulsion, or placed from a barge at a working berth. A sealed concrete apron is a fraction of the section thickness, needs no rock barges or dredging allowance, and does not require periodic topping up, so the total installed and whole-life cost can be lower even though concrete costs more per cubic metre.
Proserve’s scour protection is installed by the contractor’s own divers, trained and supported on site by Proserve’s engineers. Proserve designs, engineers and fabricates the system; the marine team installs it.
For piled berths, the mattress is woven to match the pile grid, with integral pile seals the diver clips to each pile for strong restraint. Where piles are irregular, bespoke cut-outs are fabricated from an as-built survey.
Give us the structure, the vessel classes and the seabed, and our engineers will tell you whether a concrete mattress is the right protection — and, where it is, what the section would look like on your project.
