Computational and Experimental Investigation Of Water Surface Around Bridge Piers

Free surface flow around bridge piers is one of the most important problems of open channel hydraulics. The structural design of the bridge should be done correctly along with the hydraulic design by simulating the water surface around the bridge piers together with the scour that will occur around the bridge piers. If the hydraulic design of the bridge piers is not good enough, it can cause very serious damages in situations such as floods and overflows. The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of bridge piers on the water surface experimentally and numerically. For the numerical analysis, FLOW-3D, a computational fluid dynamics package program that performs 3-dimensional solution, and HEC-RAS package program are used and the results are compared. In the study, flows with the same velocity for different number of bridge openings were studied and compared with the experimental results. In addition, the FLOW 3D package program, which performs solutions with the finite volume method, was compared with the experimental results by performing solutions with different mesh sizes. As a result, it was observed that the solutions performed with the FLOW-3D package program showed very close results with the experimental data.