GAO Jian-yong 1, HU Xiao 1, XING Yi-chuan 2

1. Earthquake Engineering Research Center, IWHR, Beijing 100048, China
2. Graduate Department, IWHR, Beijing 100048, China

Abstract: The vertical gear-rack ship-lift has been widely applied to large water and hydropower projects in China, due to its speed, safety and reliability. Since the width-height ratio of tower structure of ship lift is typically greater than 6, under horizontal ground motion, the resulting overturning moment of tower structure is so large that the interface between structure and foundation will be destroyed. When overturning moment exceeds restoring moment capacity, structure will tip about an edge of its base. It is necessary to analyze the anti-overturning stability of tower structure of ship lift under strong ground motion. Based on MATLAB 7.0 platform, the solving program of rocking equations of rigid bodies has been developed. After verification, the overturning stability of simplified tower structure of ship lift has been analyzed in this paper. The results show that the characteristics of earthquake waves, width-height ratio and sizes have important impact on overturning stabilities of tower structures. More attention should be paid to the concentration zones of tensile stresses at the bottom of tower structure to prevent bottom disengagement from resulting rocking instability.

Key words: tower structure of large-scale ship lift, Anti-overturning stability, Rocking spectrum, MAT-LAB 7.0

Published in: Journal of China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (Vol. 12 No. 1, 2014)