The study of the local scour behaviour due to interference between abutment and two shapes of a bridge pier

Although the complexities and irrevocable consequences associated with bridge scour have attracted researchers interest, their studies scarcely indicated the effect of a bridge pier proximity to an abutment. This research aims to measure maximum scour depth and exhibit the impact of pier-abutment scour interference based on laboratory experiments where vertical-wall abutment and two shapes of a pier (oblong and lenticular) were used at three different spacings (23.5, 16.0, 9.0 cm). The results showed an obvious increase in the scour depth ratio when increasing flow intensity, Froude number, and a decreasing flow depth. They also showed that reduced pier-abutment spacing was accompanied by increase in pier scour for both shapes while decrease in abutment scour. The maximum scour depth that caused by an oblong shape was more than a lenticular shape by about 10.8%. Furthermore, new empirical equations were derived using IBM SPSS Statistics 21 with determination coefficients of 0.969, 0.974, and 0.978 for oblong, lenticular and abutment, respectively. They showed the correlation between predicted and observed data.