Abstract
Soil erosion resistance is an important engineering parameter to assess scouring processes at bridge piers. Among other many methods for estimating erosion rate of soils, such as the hole erosion test and the submerged jet erosion test, the SRICOS-EFA (scour rate in cohesive soil-erosion function apparatus) method is often used to estimate soil erodibility in laboratory. This method measures the time taken to erode and remove a 1-mm-thick soil layer when the surface of a soil specimen is exposed to water flow with a constant flow rate. However, determining this duration time taken for the 1 mm erosion depth is a challenging task, causing measurement errors. This study explores the feasibility of implementation of a P-wave monitoring technique to more accurately determine the erosion time. P-wave monitoring results during the SRICOS-EFA erosion test were presented and the erosion rates obtained by a conventional method and by our new proposed technique were compared. By monitoring the arrival time of reflected P-waves, the changes in the depth of the soil surface during erosion process were precisely estimated. It revealed that this P-wave monitoring method provided more accurate measurement of the erosion rate.
