Efficiency of artificial neural networks in determining scour depth at composite bridge piers

Scouring is the most common cause of bridge failure. This study was conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in determining scour depth around composite bridge piers. The experimental data, attained in different conditions and various pile cap locations, were used to obtain the ANN model and to compare the results of the model with most well-known empirical, HEC-18 and FDOT, methods. The data were divided into training and evaluation sets. The ANN models were trained using the experimental data, and their efficiency was evaluated using statistical test. The results showed that to estimate scour at the composite piers, feed-forward propagation network with three neurons in the hidden layer and hyperbolic sigmoid tangent transfer function was with the highest accuracy. The results also indicated a better estimation of the scour depth by the proposed ANN than the empirical methods.