A review on the methods used to reduce the scouring effect of bridge pier

Abstract

Bridge pier are the most widely used hydraulics structures in ocean, offshore and river engineering. As a result, scour around bridge pier, flow prediction and it interaction are widely attracted by the civil, mechanical and marine engineers. The local scour around the piers of the bridge is one of the main causes of the bridge failure. The local scour of river water is a catastrophic effect on the engineering structures. It leaves them under dangerous, maintenance prone conditions and occasionally leads to loss of life. The damage to the hydraulic and civil structure due to local scour is a global problem and has been studied experimentally and numerically by many researchers for several decades. In this paper, local scour around bridge piers as a complex phenomenon has been explained and the problem to countermeasure the local scour effect. In past two decade computer simulations have been developed for bridge pier scouring. They have an advantage of being able to simulate a situation at full scale scenario, and can easily alter the geometry as required. Early CFD simulations were mainly focused on single-phase model which require empirical sediment transport equations to predict sand motion. Multiphase CFD simulation models are a most recent development; they model sediment transport as a granular flow to predict the sand movement and analyse the scour depth. The experimental validation will be undertaken using generic water tunnel. A series of scale models will be developed in the future as per the geometric characteristic of CFD models.