Reducción de la socavación local al pie de una pila de puentes en ríos

A project is described, whose objective was experimentally to reduce local scour at the foot of a bridge’s piles in rivers, by adding a V shaped transition to the pile. Three different angles were tested at the vertex of the "V", at front of the pile. To obtain this objective, a physical model of a circular pile in a sand drag channel was designed, built, calibrated and operated and the geometry that significantly reduced the scour at the foot of the pile was experimentally determined, which required another transition also in V of 40°, downstream of the pile. With the results of the project, the maximum scour depth caused by a flood at the foot of a pile was reduced until to 93%.