Clear-water and live-bed scour depth modelling around bridge pier using support vector machine

In recent history, local scour around the bridge piers has been a major cause of bridge failure; therefore, it is important to precisely predict the equilibrium scour depth. When the flow of water interacts with the bridge pier in the mobile bed, it usually results in local scour. In this paper, a total of 442 clear-water scouring (CWS) data and 300 live-bed scouring (LBS) data are collected from literature to model scour depth using a support vector machine. A sensitivity study was also carried out to assess the reliability of the model, and the strength of the proposed model is tested via an error analysis. The coefficient of determination (R2) value was found to be greater than 0.90 for both CWS and LBS. The present model is compared with more than 10 popular existing models and it has been discovered to be more reliable and efficient in estimating scour depth around bridge piers.