The deep-water commercial port to be built, object of this paper, is an island port which will be served by a sea access bridge supported by piles. In order to determine the hydrodynamic forces on the various piles of this bridge a three-stages methodology was set up. An analysis of the loads was first carried out theoretically, the second stage consisted in carrying out physical model tests for a selected pile and in a third stage a numerical model was used. The paper will discuss the means and programme of the tests, and in particular the selection of characteristic waves and the results obtained.
