Scour Around Exposed Pile Foundations

Abstract

Laboratory experiments were conducted to measure local scour around exposed pile groups for a variety of conditions including different spacings, different skew angles, different patterns and different exposures of a pile cap in the flow field . Two existing methods, one from FHWA's HEC-18 (Richardson et al, 1993) and one from the Summary of Pier Scour Equations used by the People's Republic of China (Gao Dongguang et ai, 1994) were evaluated to the extent that they could be applied to the data. Since neither of these methods agreed well with the experimental data, a hybrid procedure based in part on concepts from these two methods was developed and is proposed for consideration.