Scour by jets in cohesionless and cohesive soils

A technique is developed in this paper to unify the methods of analyzing scour by turbulent water jets in cohesionless and cohesive soils. Data from previous studies using circular turbulent impinging jets and circular turbulent wall jets are used to compare the scour in low void ratio cohesive soils to that in uniform sands and gravels. Scour by these jets is related to the dimensionless excess stress on the soil bed. It is seen that this parameter will likely work well for developing a method to predict scour for circular wall jets that is applicable to both materials. However, a circular impinging jet appears to vary appreciably in its interaction with the bed between the two types of soil, which makes developing a unified method to predict scour by impinging jets more difficult.