Scour risk management at bridges - A comparison of Japanese and French scoring methodologies

WCRR2019, 12th World Congress on Railway Research, TOKYO, JAPON, 28-/10/2019 - 01/11/2019Scour phenomenon concerns all structures located in a hydraulic environment. Transport network (railway or roadway) bridges structures are highly concerned and several collapses have occurred in Japan, France and other countries. Developing methods that can evaluate bridges at high risk of scouring is important from the viewpoint of infrastructure management. Japan (RTRI) and France have recently worked separately on the problem of scour phenomenon (mainly through the current ANR research project ?SSHEAR? [9][11]) and both have developed scoring tables in the past 5 years to evaluate the risk of scour at bridge structures. Discussions and common works have been ongoing for 2 years between these two countries and both methodologies have been applied on a set of Japanese and French bridges. In this research paper, we explain the two methodologies and we point out major differences of each approach by comparing the scores resulting from both methods on a set of bridges. In this case study, we adopted 10 bridges including both cases with and without the damage history from scouring. Finally, we compare the relationship between the evaluation results and the damage history and it was found that both methods can evaluate the scour risk properly