Merging Laboratory and Field Data in Bridge Scour

Abstract

Highway engineers are dealing with a major effort to assess and evaluate our nation's bridges for scour. Advanced technology is urgently needed to make a meaningful impact on this effort. In order to understand the process of scour at bridges, a great number of laboratory experiments have been conducted, particularly in the past 5 to 10 years. The laboratory experiments tend to provide only worst‐case conditions and often do not reflect actual field conditions. In response to this problem, researchers and state and federal highway agencies are collection field data for the purpose of improving and verifying methods of predicting scour. In this paper, current laboratory and field pier scour studies are described and the problem of merging the two data sets is examined.