Bridge scour is the removal of sediment

such as sand and rocks from around

bridge abutments or piers. Scour can scoop out scour
holes, compromising the integrity of a structure.

Cause of Bridge Scour

Removal of river bed substrate around bridge piers and abutments, also known as scour,
presents a significant cost and risk in the maintenance of many bridges throughout the world.
Bridge scour is comprised of three components: long-term aggradations and degradation of the
river bed, general scour and local scour. Among them, local scour contributes mostly to bridge
scour. The bridge substructures susceptible to local scour, such as piers and abutments, change
local hydraulics drastically because of the appearance of large-scale unsteadiness and shedding
of coherent vortices, such as horseshoe vortices. Figure 1 shows a sketch of the horseshoe
vortex formed around the base of a bridge pier by a separating boundary layer. The horseshoe
vortex has high lift and shear stress and triggers the onset of sediment scour and a scour hole is
formed as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The formation of horseshoe vortex around a bridge pier.

The flow around an abutment involves highly separated vortex flow as shown in Figure 2. A
separation bubble is formed at upstream corner of the abutment. Downstream of the
abutment, unsteady shedding wake vortices are created due to the separation of the flow at
the abutment corners. These wake vortices are very unsteady and oriented approximately
vertical with low pressure at the vortex cores. These vortices act like small tornadoes, lift up
sediment and create a large scour hole behind the abutment. The down flow at the front of the
abutment is developed under the large vertical pressure gradient around the stagnation point

CE 322 – WEEK 9-10 Lecture 3-Bridge Scour Page 1

of the approaching flow. The down flow rolls up and forms the primary vortex as shown in
Figure 2, which is similar to the formation of the horseshoe vortex around a single bridge pier.

Figure 2. Flow structure around the vertical-wall abutment.

For the spill-through abutment, the flow is accelerated around the contraction and
separated downstream of the contraction leading edge as shown in Figure 3. There is a free
surface level difference before and after the contraction leading edge due to the free surface
vortex formation. The spill-though abutment has the scour hole at the downstream of the
model with the similar order of depth of the vertical square corner wall due to the free surface
vortex generated at the leading edge of the contraction.

Figure 3. Flow structure around the spill-through abutment.

CE 322 – WEEK 9-10 Lecture 3-Bridge Scour Page 2