Abstract:

Design of bridge piers is so much important for the structural safety of bridges, however, at least at the same extent, hydraulic analysis of bridge piers is also required. Bridge piers are structures that obstruct the flow by narrowing the flow area and can cause flooding in the bridge upstream. Therefore, with the light of numerical and experimental studies, accurate estimations of the occurrence of water surface profiles and affluxes resulted from the construction of bridge piers under different flow conditions are the major part of bridge hydraulics. In this study, the effects of bridge piers with four different cross-sections and four different skew angles on the water surface profiles and the affluxes were experimentally and numerically investigated. The experimental study has been conducted in a flume with dimensions of 10x0.309x0.45m in Department of Civil Engineering Hydraulics Laboratory at Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University. The experimental measurements were taken using 4 different shapes of bridge piers (square, circular, oblong and ogival upstream face) and 4 different skew angles (00, 150, 300 and 450), and the images obtained from video recordings of each experiment were converted into numerical values using an image processing technique. In addition, commercial package program HEC-RAS software and a direct step method were also used for the numerical modelling and the numerical water surface profiles and affluxes were also obtained for the purpose of comparisons. In the conclusion part, the comments on the applicability of HEC-RAS software and the suitability of the image processing technique were given for the similar problems.

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