Experimental Study of Local Scour around Truncated Piles in Oscillatory Flow

The paper presents an experimental study of local scour around truncated vertical piles subject to oscillatory flow. The experiments were conducted with six height-to-diameter ratios (h/D =0.25~3.5) and three KC numbers (33, 52 and 80). The development of scour depth around the pile was reported. It was found that the effect of h/D on the scour depth reduces with increasing KC, and h/D does not affect the finial scour depth anymore when h/D≥ 2.5. For the three KC numbers tested here, the scour time scale reduces with the increase of h/D when h/D ≤ 0.5. The finial scour profiles were scanned through a three-dimensional scanner. The slope angle of the scour hole was extracted from the three-dimensional scan.