A review of Soils, Structures and Hydraulics: Expertise and Applied Research (SSHEAR) project

Scouring processes are a major cause of instability and destruction of structures (bridges, earthworks and buildings) especially during major floods. The consideration of these erosion phenomena remains too empirical, especially because they are particularly complex and involve many disciplinary fields: soil mechanics, fluid mechanics, structures... With a view to going beyond this empiricism, to develop knowledge and finally to improve diagnosis, warning and management methods, the SSHEAR project (?Soils, Structures and Hydraulics: Expertise and Applied Research?), supported by ANR (French ?National Research Agency?), has combined 6 partners with these skills. Its objective is to improve knowledge on scour mechanisms and to develop innovative tools for observation and modeling at the scale of both experimental models and full-scale structures.