World's Largest Ship Elevator Opens at Three Gorges Dam in Central China

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The world's largest ship elevator at the Three Gorges Dam opened in Yichang City, central China's Hubei Province, on Sunday, with a prospect to increase the shipping capacity past the dam by six million tons a year.

The elevator, the existing largest lifting structure on a navigation route with the highest technical difficulty of the world, features large engineering scope, high lifting height and large weight lifting operation.

The largest weight to be handled by the elevator is freighter of 3,000 DWT(deadweight ton) and the maximum vertical lifting height is 113 meters.

The main components of the structure are four 169-meter high reinforced concrete towers. The chamber, a self-support orthotropic plate structure that is 120 meters long and 18 meters wide, works as a gigantic basin.

Weighting around 15,500 tons, the elevator carries the ships upwards or downwards to pass the dam.

A special safety mechanism, or a brake pad, is fixed. Four short screw sections connected to the ship chamber work as rotary locking rods.

They rotary locking rods work continuously in an internal thread, or a nut post, that is fixed to the towers. If an accident occurs, this rotation is blocked and traction is achieved that supports the ship chamber independently.

The elevator will cut journey times for passenger, cruise and small cargo ships passing through the dam from over three hours to about 40 minutes.

Larger vessels still have to pass the dam by means of a two-lane, five-chamber lock chain like climbing stairs. "Large vessels walk the stairs, small ones take the elevator" to pass the Three Gorges Dam for some time to come.

The elevator marks the completion of the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River, which aims at producing electricity, increasing the Yangtze River's shipping capacity and reducing the potential for floods downstream by providing flood storage space.

Комментарии
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This is an impressive bit of engineering!

RickSaffery
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Drive a ship into elevator is such a epic work to do.

ML-povy
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wow..china..please ignore the west.love from India

arjunraj
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I have worked on this type of project.feeling proud...

desimaja
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Pretty awesomely innovative way to efficiently get ships above the massive dam and upriver.

louisaloi
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Apparently it works. Looks like it might be expandable to handle longer boats.

stokerboiler
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Wow, pretty cool - looking forward to April 6th when I'm on the cruise! (It seems the passengers can stay on during the ride?)

progo
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Just wait till you see how the doors work!
Amazing!

dragonskunkstudio
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that should be really impressive when you are in it.

aurelienclair
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Hope to ride this elevator next month.

Mayangone
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china great country of great people of china means rise of

yawaryawar
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The elevator has much faster throughput than transitional locks. But it's meant for small ships only. Bigger ships still need to go through the locks (over four hours).

LLee
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Wow, an impressive piece of design and engineering. Does anyone know if the caisson is counter-balanced in some way?

Smannellites
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China has done many engineering feats in the past like Grand Canal and the Great Wall. This is only the continuation.

Shenzhou.
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I didn't know ship elevators were a thing, let alone being the world's largest.

Scdny
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Wow that's so cool, but where does it take you next in a dam?

emilpettersson
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Even I, who was in charge of the entire Three Gorges Project of building five hydroelectric dams, was amazed by the elevator.

bobbydias
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Hooda thunkit? Who needs locks? Damn, that's impressive.

dannymccune
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Damn, looks like Dishonored's intro but way bigger.

Deses
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Yay! Now the ships can be safe from flooding yay!

maggiexi