Assessing the Suitability of Bridge Scour Monitoring Devices

Bridge scour is a complex bridge management problem. It is also a difficult forensic engineering challenge as the greatest risk occurs during large flows and flood events, when visual inspection of the bridge piers is often not possible. This paper presents a review of scour prediction and modelling methods, whose results are used to determine the key parameters that scour monitoring systems need to capture. Then, a review of existing monitoring approaches and technologies for scour monitoring is presented. The paper concludes with the proposal of a novel rating system to evaluate different scour monitoring techniques. The new rating system is trialled ex-post for seven previously published bridge scour monitoring case studies to illustrate the use of the new methodology.