Physical Modeling to Improve the Safe Foundation Designing of the Urban Integral Abutment Bridge

Municipal organizations in cooperation with local water companies try to create a continuous flow in the urban rivers to beautify the urban landscape in correlation with the eco-tourism aspects. Re-shaping the rivers’ floodplains by converting them to the landscapes, residential, complex centers has reduced the width of the rivers. This reduction the river width, increased flood intensity, greatly. Therefore, gradually weakening of the bridge foundations and high flow intensity, increase the probability of bridge failures. Bridge failure has significant effects on both the social and economic aspects of a region, and the stability of a bridge structure is closely associated with scour. Accurate prediction of the maximum depth of potential scour at a bridge foundation is important for the safe design of bridge footings. Experience has shown that insufficient attention is paid to contraction scour at Integral Abutment Bridges (IAB). Although most damage to bridges structure occur at the flooding times, undermining the bridges’ foundations in a relatively long duration of time make the bridge foundation weak for the final failure at the flash flooding conditions. The current paper experimentally investigated a full-scale IAB model to estimate the clear-water contraction scour on protruding abutments in the compound channel. The tests were run to find the relationship between maximum contraction scour depth and abutment protrusion into the main-channel. The results of the validation and graphical analysis yield satisfactory predictions. Findings of the current study can help determine the footing design and depth that could minimize both construction and maintenance costs.

کلیدواژه ها:

Urban Landscape ، Integral Abutment Bridge ، Compound River ، Floodplain