The Behavior of Scouring Around Multiple Bridge Piers Having Different Shapes

Abstract

Abstract In this research, a numerical simulation was conducted to study the behavior of the scouring pattern and the effect of spacing between bridge piers at specified hydraulic conditions such as velocity, depth of flow, and the sediment effective diameter. Moreover, the cross-section shape of piers and their effect on the scouring depth around bridge piers was studied, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), ANSYS (Fluent) software. A comparison of the simulation results obtained with previous laboratory investigations was done to verify the validity of the numerical model. Generally, the scour pattern using the CFD software gave good agreement with the experimental study. A reversed proportion between scour depth and the spacing between piers were noticed, as pier spacing increase the scour depths decrease, for the spacing ratios were 2, 3.5, 4.6, 5.5, and the maximum scour depths were 32, 34, 37, 50 mm respectively. The results show that the minimum scouring depth happened with triangle-noise pier, then with oblong pier, and the maximum was with pier having a circular section. Moreover, results show that the maximum scouring depths at the center pier are 22, 29, and 36 mm for these shapes respectively.