Riprap Failure at Circular Bridge Piers
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 4
Abstract
Riprap of bridge piers is placed to prevent scour and to secure the pier from failure. Riprap is therefore an addition to a pier to increase its performance against scour. The present research intends to present three basic scour mechanisms associated with circular-shaped bridge piers in rivers first, to introduce then a number of selected experiments for a range of hydraulic, geometric, and sedimentologic conditions, and finally to describe a novel procedure for assessing the safety of these river elements against failure. This procedure is based on the Shields diagram relating to sediment entrainment in a uniform and flat sediment bed subjected by a water flow. The Shields approach is extended for the presence of a circular-shaped pier that is protected by a circular-arranged riprap layer of equal size elements. The design procedure presented in the following thus reduces to the entrainment condition of a pier for equal riprap and the sediment sizes and to the Shields entrainment condition when the pier diameter degenerates to 0.
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Acknowledgment
The first writer was supported by the Swiss National Research Foundation, Grant No. UNSPECIFIED2-77095-01.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 132 • Issue 4 • April 2006
Pages: 354 - 362
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 2, 2004
Accepted: May 19, 2005
Published online: Apr 1, 2006
Published in print: Apr 2006
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