Case Histories in Soil and Rock Erosion: Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Brazos River Meander, Normandy Cliffs, and New Orleans Levees
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 134, Issue 10
Abstract
This lecture presents four case history examples of erosion processes. Because the topic of soil and rock erosion is relatively underdeveloped in geotechnical engineering, an introduction precedes the case histories to describe some fundamental aspects of erosion. Erosion involves the soil or rock through its erodibility, the water through its velocity, and the geometry of the obstacle through its size and shape. Knowledge of these three components is needed for any erosion problem to be studied and solved. A set of fundamental issues are addressed in the first part including an erodibility classification for soils and rocks, an explanation of the stresses imposed by the water on the soil-water or rock-water interface, and an explanation of how the geometry impacts the problem. The Woodrow Wilson Bridge case history outlines a new and less conservative method to compute the scour depth and gives examples of bridge scour calculations. The Brazos River meander case history outlines a new method to predict meander migration and gives an example of migration calculations. The Pointe du Hoc case history gives an explanation of a process of rock cliff erosion. The New Orleans levees case history gives an example of erosion of levees by overtopping and proposes an erosion design chart for levee overtopping. Whenever possible the results are presented in a probabilistic fashion. All case histories make use of the erosion function apparatus, an apparatus developed to quantify the erodibility of a soil or rock and to give the constitutive law for erosion problems: the erosion function. The power point slides for the lecture including many photos of the case histories are available at ⟨http://ceprofs.tamu.edu/briaud/⟩ under “Lectures” and the video (DVD) of the lecture is available from the author, free of charge.
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Acknowledgments
Many students, many university colleagues, and many practitioner colleagues have contributed to making this lecture possible. One of the great pleasures in preparing this lecture was to feel the power of team work. Thank you all for being part of the 9th Ralph B. Peck Lecture team: Hamn-Ching Chen (Texas A&M), Kuang-An Chang (Texas A&M), Anand Govindasamy (Texas A&M), Namgyu Park (Texas A&M), Po Yeh (Texas A&M), Jennifer Nicks (Texas A&M), Ok-Youn Yu (Texas A&M), Remon Abdelmalak (Texas A&M), Xingnian Chen (Texas A&M), Rick Ellman (Mueser Rutledge), Bea Hunt (Hardesty & Hanover), Stan Davis (Maryland SHA), Sterling Jones (FHWA), Rune Storesund (UC Berkeley), Ray Seed (UC Berkeley), Bob Bea (UC Berkeley), Tom Dahl (TxDOT), Bob Warden (Texas A&M), Mark Everett (Texas A&M), and Phil Buchanan (Buchanan Soil Mechanics).
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 134 • Issue 10 • October 2008
Pages: 1425 - 1447
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 6, 2007
Accepted: May 9, 2008
Published online: Oct 1, 2008
Published in print: Oct 2008
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