The world's largest ship-lift in the Three Gorges, central China's Hubei Province, has greatly boosted Yangtze River shipping but it is over demand.
Designed jointly by a Chinese-German team, the lift has greatly reduced the time for ships passing through the Three Gorges Dam in the city of Yichang.
The ship-lift is equipped with a ship-chamber, which has a pool of water 120-meters long, 18-meters wide and 3.5-meters deep. The chamber's mechanical systems and the water weigh 15,500 tonnes altogether.
It takes about 10 minutes to lift a 3,000-ton ship to a vertical height of a nearly 40-storey building. It is a "ship lift" the largest in scale and the biggest in technical difficulty in the world.
"At present, the lift allows the passage of nearly 18 ships a day and the time of passing through the ship lock averages about 51 minutes. It operates in conjunction with the ship locks of the Three Gorges. The Three Gorges project has greatly stimulated shipping of the Yangtze River," said Jin Feng, head of the ship lift section of the Three Gorges Navigation Authority.
However, with the rapid growth in the demand for crossing the dam, the problem of inadequate capacity of the Three Gorges ship locks has become increasingly prominent and the problem for ships to wait is becoming more and more acute.
"In view of the inadequacy in the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges section, the country is studying a plan to build a new passage. If completed, it will greatly raise the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges," said Jin.
Construction of the ship-lift began in 1994. Due to technical difficulties, the project was put on hold in 1995 and it did not resume until 2008.
Sources:cctvplus
Please Contact Us at：
admin@xindemarine.com
