Author(s): F. Coscarella; C. Manes; R. Gaudio

Linked Author(s): Roberto Gaudio, Costantino Manes

Keywords: Local scour; Vertical wall abutments; Turbulence phenomenology; Bridge abutments; Scale-independent formula

Abstract: The scaling results developed by Manes and Brocchini (2015) for local scour around bridge piers are herein tested for the case of vertical wall bridge abutments. The presence of bridge abutments in rivers causes a local scouring phenomenon that can lead to structural failure. The enormous amount of research developed to derive predictive formulae has been so far carried out following the classical empirical approach based on dimensional analysis and data-fitting (Melville 1992, Barbhuiya and Dey, 2004). This approach suffers of scale issues, because the data were obtained primarily from laboratory experiments, which are hardly representative of field conditions. Moreover, this approach does not furnish a theoretical basis to understand the physics underpinning experimental results. Recently, Manes and Brocchini (2015) derived a new predictive formula to calculate the scour depth at piers, which merges the phenomenological theory of turbulence with the empirical observations. This approach (which is scale-independent and clarifies the effects of the dimensionless groups on local scour) is now extended to the case of abutments. The analysis is limited to the case of clear-water and fully rough conditions.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/978-981-11-2731-1_236-cd

Year: 2018