Experimental and numerical study of local scour around side-by-side bridge piers under ice-covered conditions

Local scour around piers and abutments is one of the main causes of the collapse of many bridges constructed inside rivers. Many researchers have conducted various studies to predict the maximum depth of a scour hole around bridge piers and abutments. However, most of them have been done in small-scale laboratory flumes and specifically for the open channel condition. Besides, most of the existing research on bridge piers uses uniform sediment which is not an appropriate representative of natural river systems. This can result in excessively conservative design values for scour in low risk or non-critical hydrologic conditions. The most severe cases of bridge pier scouring occur in cold regions when the surface of water turns into ice in which, an additional boundary layer is being added to the water surface, which leads to significant changes in the flow field and scour pattern around bridge piers. Ice cover also causes the maximum flow velocity to move closer to the channel bed.