Vulnerability Assessment of Bridges Exposed to Scour in a Multi-Hazard
Environment by UAV Measurements
Abstract
Bridge foundation scour is the most common cause for the failure of
highway bridges. The assessment of local scouring mechanism around
bridge piers provides information for decision-making regarding the pile
footing design, predicting the safety of bridges under critical scoured
conditions, and as a result, may help prevent unnecessary loses. Since
scour in bridges is the water-induced erosion of soil particles around
bridge foundations, the loss of lateral load capacity at bridge
foundations may induce bridges to become highly vulnerable to failure
when the effects of scour and floods are combined. In this study, high
definition 3D models of the flood plain and the amount of current scour
in bridge piles were acquired by Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based
measurements which provide a practical approach and bring high precision
solutions considering traditional measurement systems. The present study
evaluated the performance of bridges with reinforced concrete (RC) pile
foundations under the effects of local scour and flood. Thus, a RC
bridge constructed over Boğaçayı in Antalya, Turkey was selected as the
case study. The vulnerability of the bridge was assessed under flood
loading considering the predicted scour amount. The maximum flood loads
according to different return periods (5, 20, 50, 100 and 500 years) and
the corresponding maximum scour depths were determined by HEC-RAS
software. As a result, the outputs were regarded as input parameters for
the evaluation of lateral behavior of the bridge under consideration.
The soil-pile foundation-structure interaction was implemented in the
finite element models of pile groups. The multi-hazard performance of
the bridge was evaluated under the maximum predicted scour depth and
corresponding flood load. In conclusion, as the scour depth increased
the fundamental periods, shear forces and the bending moments were
observed to increase while the pile lateral load capacities diminished.
Therefore, it was ascertained that the scour substantially deteriorated
the performance of the bridge under multi-hazard environment.