Abstract
The U.S. navigable infrastructure is a system of waterways dependent upon hydraulic steel structures (HSS) to facilitate the passage of ships and cargo. The system is linear in the sense that if one HSS is impassable, the entire river system is halted at that point. The majority of the HSS in this system were built in the first half of the 20th Century, and over seventy percent of them are past or near past their design life. Miter gates are critical HSS components within the system and many are showing signs of structural distress from continued operation past their design life. Common distress features include shear cracking within the pintle socket, partially missing Quoin blocks, fatigue fracturing, and bolt failure in the pintle region. This article focuses on gaining a fundamental understanding of the consequences of quoin block deterioration on a miter gate. The work was conducted by developing a computational model of a miter gate with different levels of quoin block deterioration. This model was validated using analytical solutions. The deterioration results demonstrated that the miter gate thrust diaphragm and quoin post experienced changes in their limit states due to deterioration. The results also demonstrated that the miter gate could overcome up to 10% of quoin block deterioration.
Highlights
Received: 15 November 2021The United States has 40,233 km of inland, and intra-waterways with over 240 locks that form the Nation’s “water highway” for freight transportation [1]
This article presents a methodology that uses a finite element analysis model to perform numerical simulations on miter gates to evaluate their behavior when subjected to different levels of deterioration of the quoin block
This is essential because the current inventory of hydraulic structures in the US are more than 50 years old and are suffering deterioration of the quoin block
Summary
The United States has 40,233 km of inland, and intra-waterways with over 240 locks that form the Nation’s “water highway” for freight transportation [1]. This portion of the system transports a significant percentage of the agricultural and industrial goods in the U.S [1,3,4]. Other HSSs have required complete replacement due to serious fatigue cracking such as the Melvin Price Lock [7,8,9], the Upper Mississippi River Lock 27 [10,11], and the Dalles miter gate [12,13,14] This low-level condition of the navigational infrastructure is costing economic losses in productivity and efficiency due to the increase of lock stoppages [1,5]. The normal operation of a lock and the miter gate’s function is introduced, along with typical gate geometry and components
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