| Due to the prevalence of bridge failures resulting from scour or scour-related complications, design of piers with respect to scour is prioritized by engineers. Current scour estimation methods typically over-predict scour depth, which results in uneconomical design. This tendency is partly due to the complexity of the scouring process, indicating that there are many aspects of scour which are still not well understood, and can also be attributed to scale effects in scour modelling. In this investigation, experimentation was completed in order to isolate the influences of governing non-dimensional parameters (relative coarseness and flow shallowness) on scour. Results from testing were then compared with results from previous investigations at the University of Windsor, and the influences of densimetric Froude number and separation velocity (representative of channel blockage) on scour were determined. A new scour estimation method based on these influences is presented and compared with methods used in current practice. |
