Riprap Failure at Circular Bridge Piers

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.