Experimental Investigation of Local Scour around a Complex Bridge Pier

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shahid Bahonar University, Kerman, Iran

2 Department of Water Engineering, Faculty of Agricultural Engineering, Ferdowsi University, Mashad, Iran

Abstract

One of the main reason for bridge collapses may be flood flow scour. This interesting subject attracted many researchers, resulting in improvement of many theoretical and experimental works. In this study, local scour around complex pier was experimentally investigated. The experiments were carried out in a concrete rectangular flume. The flume was 0.77 m wide, 0.6 m deep and 21.85 m long. The flume was filled by uniform sand with median size of d50=0.71 mm and geometric standard deviation of σg= 1.135. Complex pier consisted of a column, a pile cap that was rested on array of piles. The experiments were conducted using clear-water condition. To observe the geometric parameters effect (pile cap upstream extension, pile group arrangement, pile group upstream extension, and pile cap thickness) on scour depth, six models of complex pier were performed. A total of 82 experiments were carried out to study local scour. To evaluate the complex pier scour depth commonly procedures such as HEC-18, Coleman (2005), Sheppard et al. (2004), and Ataie-Ashtiani et al. (2010) were applied. The results show that, there is a good agreement between measured data and theoretical estimation and also there was no harmony between a measured and estimated data. The collected data were used to evaluate some leading existing theoretical and experimental methods for calculation the maximum scour depth around the complex piers.

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