Physical Modeling of Scour below Single and Double Submerged Pipes

Due to considerable economic, environmental and social impacts, scouring around pipelines has been focus of consideration by different researchers and designers of hydraulic structures. Presentresearch was carried out to investigate the flow pattern, scour mechanism, and temporal evolution of scour hole around the submerged pipes at the Hydraulic Laboratory of Department of Water Engineering located in Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman. The experiments were performed for single pipe and two parallel pipes (double pipes) with different spacing and hydraulic conditions. The results showed that, when water flows around the pipe, the scour process started by establishment the piping flow from pipe upstream side to downstream side. Next, the tunneling erosion was occurred and a flow jet passed below the pipeline, which was the main factor for the development of scour hole. In the case of double pipes, depending on the spacing between the two pipes, different profiles were observed at the scour hole. For both cases of single and double pipes, by increasing the flow discharge, the depth of the scour hole increased. In addition, the observations revealed that the scour depth for single pipe was always more than the double pipes. In the case of double pipes, the interactions between flow and pipes weakened the vortices strength. Under this circumstance, the depth of scour hole at single pipe was less than double pipes, so that, for the discharge of 28 L/s, the maximum scour depth of the single pipe was 1.27 times more than that of the double pipes.