A new double-arch structure for the gate used as tidal barrage and sluice was adopted in Caoe River Dam in China. It was a spatial structure made up of the right arch, the invert arch, the chord, etc., and was designed to bear bilateral loads. To research the cyclic behavior of the new double-arch structure, a scale-model cyclic test was conducted. First, the test setup and test method were presented in detail, and according to the test results, the cyclic behavior and failure characteristics of this structure were discussed. Then by analyzing the test cyclic envelope curve, it was found the curve was divided into three stages: the elastic stage, the local plastic stage and the failure stage at the local yield point and structural yield point. The gate model has local yield strength and structural yield strength, with both their values being bigger than that of the designing load. Therefore, the gate is safe enough for the projects. At last, dynamic property of the gate was analyzed considering additional mass of the water. It was found that the tidal bore shock would not cause resonance vibration of the gate.
A new, general type of planar linkages is presented, which extends the classical linkages developed by Kempe consisting of two single-looped kinematic chains of linkages, interconnected by revolute hinges. Together with a locking device, these new linkages have only one degree of freedom (DOF), which makes them ideal for serving as deployable structures for different purposes. Here, we start with a fresh matrix method of analysis for double-loop planar linkages, using 2D transformation matrices and a new symbolic notation. Further inspection for one case of Kempe’s linkages is provided. Basing on the inspection, by means of some novel algebraic and geometric techniques, one particularly fascinating solution was found. Physical models were built to show that the derivation in this paper is valid and the new mechanisms are correct.
Under certain load pattern, the geometrically indeterminate pin-jointed mechanisms will present certain shapes to keep static equalization. This paper proposes a matrix-based method to determine the mobility and equilibrium stability of mechanisms according to the effects of the external loads. The first and second variations of the potential energy function of mechanisms under conservative force field are analyzed. Based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) method, a new crite- rion for the mobility and equilibrium stability of mechanisms can be concluded by analyzing the equilibrium matrix. The mobility and stability of mechanisms can be classified by unified matrix formulae. A number of examples are given to demonstrate the proposed criterion. In the end, criteria are summarized in a table.
