Vulnerability of Highway Bridges for Scour Problems

In this paper we present a study of the behavior of common types of highway bridges in response to scour of their bearing elements, when exposed to design floods. For this purpose, we considered the inherent characteristics of the substructure and assessed potential failure conditions in relation to easily measurable parameters, which associate flood characteristics with a certain level of erosion of the stream bed. To conduct this investigation, we analyzed some of the expressions proposed in the literature to determine local scour at the pier base, in order to define the most influential parameters, which will be used jointly with the forces produced by the stream pressure of the water to reproduce the process of collapse or partial failure of piers. Simplified models were constructed, with which we obtained the response for rectangular piers considering the effect of scour.