Scour Monitoring System

Scouring is wearing away of riverbed material that supports piers or abutments. The piles or pier foundation get exposed down to significant depths due to large scale scouring. This may destabilize the foundation of the bridge causing bridge failure. Scouring thus compromises the safety of the bridge. It has been the cause of failure of several bridges around the world. It is thus, critical for the stakeholders to detect the occurrence of stream/riverbed scour at bridge piers and monitor the scour depth variation.

Encardio Rite offers two innovative bridge (streambed) scour monitoring solutions that provide crucial information in near real-time on the dynamics of sediment scour and aggregation.

Model EBSM-101M Magnetic scour monitoring system. It uses a magnetic collar on an embedded stainless steel body tubular probe. The magnetic collar rests on the river bed and follows the level of the streambed as scouring takes place. It slides over a stainless steel support pipe inserted vertically into the streambed. The sensor probe, inside the stainless steel support pipe, consists of a switch array at 45 mm intervals. As the magnetic collar comes in proximity, a switch at that particular depth closes, giving the downward movement data of the magnetic collar.
Model EBSM-101S Sonar scour monitoring system. It uses an active sonar sensor to monitor the depth of the riverbed. The sonar sensor monitors the stream/river bed depth by acoustic echo ranging based on the speed of sound in water. It measures the elevation of the stream/river bed at programmable time intervals by sending acoustic pulses from the sonar sensor to the streambed.

Each system has its application and is used based on the site's requirements. Their rugged design is ideal for the safety monitoring of structures such as bridges that are located in high-current or deep-water environments.

Model EBSM-101 datalogger is available to accept input from up to three magnetic probes and/or sonar scour monitoring sensors. The magnetic and sonar monitoring sensors are connected to the datalogger through separate individual serial bus cables. The datalogger has the facility to collect and store recorded data and transfer it to a central remote server at desired intervals over a wired or cellular telemetry link.

A data management software (Drishti) can be installed on a central server to process and analyze the data. In case any value breaches the programmed alert level, the system sends an alarm to the stakeholders via SMS or email.