Local scour at abutments: A review

Abstract

Failure of bridges due to local scour has motivated many investigators to explore the causes of scouring and to predict the maximum scour depth at abutments. In this paper, a detailed review of the up-to-date work on scour at abutments is presented including all possible aspects, such as flow field, scouring process, parameters affecting scour depth, time-variation of scour and scour depth estimation formulae.