Behavior of Flexible Pintles for Miter Gates

Abstract

The United States Army Corps of Engineers assumes that horizontally framed miter gates thrust into lock chamber walls under hydraulic head. However, in many gates the bottom hinge, a fixed pintle, interrupts this thrusting action by taking a portion of the load itself. As the fixed pintle is not designed for such loading, the resulting high pintle stresses significantly reduce pintle life. This research proposes alternative designs to increase pintle flexibility enough to allow the gate to fully thrust into the wall. Designs include a free pintle, rocking pintle, and elastomeric bearing pad pintle. These flexible pintle designs are evaluated for their ability to allow the gate to thrust into the wall and reduce stress. This research finds that the flexible pintles improve the thrusting behavior into the wall. Although the elastomeric bearing pad pintle is found to be the most flexible pintle, further research of fatigue damage in elastomeric bearing pads is required to show that the elastomeric bearing pad is better than the fixed pintle.