INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

The 20th Century witnessed an unprecedented huge leaps in technological advancements. Key
among these were those in the field of engineering. The second half of the century laid
foundations for what can be described as engineering marvels, projects in the field of
engineering that have been undertaken in massive scales never tried by humans before. These
marvels have cut across all sub-disciplines of engineering. This report will discuss the design,
technological significance and impact of the Three Gorges Dam, an engineering marvel that has
had contributed to a significant revolution in the engineering sub-disciplines of mechanical and
civil engineering.
The Three Gorges Dam is an engineering marvel because it now holds the record for the largest
hydroelectric dam in the world. The dam is located along the Yangtze River in Sandouping
Town of Yichang City, Hubei Province, China. It derives its name due to its location in the
middle of the river’s three gorges. The project was originally approved in 1992 by the Chinese
government but construction did not begin until 1994. It was projected to cost $25 billion with
funding from banks from Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil, France, Germany and Canada. Other
international funding also came from export credit agencies and foreign companies. It took 17
years for the entire project to be completed in three phases. The first phase ran from 1993 to
1997 and this included the blockade and diversion of the Yangtze River main channel to a side
channel to allow for construction of the dam. The second phase took a further 6 years to
complete and ended in 2003. The major work carried out at this phase was the construction of the
cofferdam, an impermanent barricade meant to water out of an area that would normally be
submerged. The last phases lasted until 2009 and the major work involved the completion of the
dam situated on the right bank of the river, erection of the power station and machinery
installation [1].

Figure 1: A section of the Three Gorges Dam [1]

Made of steel and concrete, the dam stretches over a span on 7,661 ft. long, a mile and a half
wide and stands at over 600 ft. high. It consumed approximately 510,000 tons of steel during its
entire construction period – more than 60 times of that used to build the Eiffel Tower in France.
It covers an area of nearly 405 square miles and with its huge capacity of 39.3 billion cubic
meters of water, it dwarves the USA’s Hoover dam as it is 5 times larger and generates 11 times
more power. It is a massive artificial lake that required over 40,000 workers to build. It has 32
turbines embedded to its and a total of 34 generators each weighing up to 6,000 tonnes. Each
turbine generates up to 700MW of clean, renewable and cheap electricity, enough to sustain the
Chinese economy for years to come. Its total capacity of nearly 20,000 MW of electric supply
makes it the largest hydro-electric power plant in the world [2].
TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT
The technology applied for this project was extremely complicated and the difficulty of its
design was superior to that of any other dam or hydro-electric project in the world. Engineers
and architects has to come up with a set of new design approaches and theories that enabled them
to overcome otherwise pertinent associated with construction of large hydraulic structures.
Through this, they were able to come up with a hydro-power station with a giant power
generation capacity, a gigantic 5-step ship lock and a very high water head. The dam is made of
up of three main sections: the dam itself, the hydro-electric power plant and a series of ship
locks. The dam was constructed with about 28 million cubic meters of concrete, making it such
an incredible concrete gravity structure. To prevent the deterioration of its foundations, spillway
gates were mounted onto concrete shoots so as to hurl exiting water more than 100 meters
downstream. The total axis length of the dam is 2309.5 m and it reaches a maximum height of
185 m. The power generation system is made up of power source station, an underground
powerhouse, and a dam toe powerhouse. It has an installed capacity of 32 power generation units
of 700 MW each and two more generating 50 MW each. In addition, it has a navigation system
made up of a vertical ship lift and a continual 5-step ship lock constructed in a double line. The
lock has a one-way transport capacity of 5 x 107 t annually [3]. Flood discharge structures are
situated at the mid-section of the riverbed. Both sides of the riverbed have the non-overflow
structures and the left- and right-bank units of the power generation plant. The powerhouses are
located on the downstream part of both plant section and the navigation components and
structures are situated at the left bank.
This massive superstructure makes a significant contribution to the social and economic progress
of China. The project has had four major socio-economic benefits to China and the world and
other countless contributions to the world of engineering and construction. The dam project has
greatly assisted in flood control. The reaches of the Yangtze River have experienced numerous
devastating floods in the past few centuries with thousands of people being killed and displaced
alongside massive loss of property. With the new dam, however, the impacts of the floods will
reduce significantly as it will have a flood control capability of up to 22.15 billion cubic meters.
In the Jingjiang River section, for instance, the standard for flood control was to limit them to no
more than a single one per decade. However, the completion of the Three Gorges Dam will limit
the floods to only one per century. The dam also has protective measures against super floods in
the upper reaches of the river [4]. With an installed water level adjusting mechanism, the giant
reservoir’s flood discharge volume can be controlled to ensure a safe flood discharge.
The project has also reduced China’s dependency on coal, a known greenhouse pollutant. The
power generation capacity of the project is approximately 84.6 billion KW of clean, renewable
energy. Each bank of the river has a hydropower station. Power generated at the dam will spur
economic development of eastern and central parts of China as well as the Guangdong province.
It has already become the heart of China’s electrical load and will continue to be critical to
national electric network and transmission from the west to the east of the country. In addition,
the project has boosted the navigation in the inland part of the country. The dam, the reservoir,
and its ship locks have made it possible for large cruise and cargo ships to travel upstream and
downstream in the river for the first time. The river’s navigation channel has now been widened,
thanks to the dam, and is more convenient for shipping. The permanent ship lock installed in the
dam is now the highest in the owing to its massive altitude. In addition, it has the biggest number
of river ship locks located inland [2]. Consequently, ships are now able to move goods to the sea
at Shanghai. Other than all that, the dam has become a major tourist destination owing to its
massive nature and beautiful scenery around it. The local people living around the river, and
indeed the country itself, has already reaped huge economic benefits from the river’s tourism
pull.
DISCUSSION
The Three Gorges Dam project was built on a massive scale and was completed in about a
decade and half. During its design and construction phases, the project faced numerous
engineering challenges that had to be overcome for the project to be a success. Two major
challenges will be discussed in this report.
The construction of the ship lock
The ship locks were constructed by cutting deep into a hill and was characterised by complex
construction on very large heights and breadths, and at full stresses with heterogeneous
characteristics. The presence of unstable monoliths in the rocks, including faults, made the
geological conditions during construction more complicated and the construction itself even
more difficult. In addition, the ship lock construction ran into other works that were facing
equally tighter schedules and this seriously interfered with its construction timelines. Also, the
excavation process of deep and steep chambers into the mountain, with specific narrow floors,
had to conform to the underground diversion channels excavated beneath it and the ship lock
valve shafts. Another major challenge was the blasting and construction operations that had to be
carried in a way that ensured the least rock mass damage as well as the safety of the workers and
machinery. In the process, the rock masses attached to the central divider had to be kept intact
[3].
It required an extensive research to come up with an integrated solution for the high slopes of the
ship lock. An integrated analysis was carried out on hydrological geology and field rocks and
various 2D and 3D underground seepage solutions formulated. Moreover, blasting operations
had to be controlled strictly and various anchoring methods were introduced to ensure the
stability of the vertical rock masses [3].

Sliding resistance of the powerhouses on the left-bank

The powerhouses on the left-bank are situated on slope of the riverfront, along the mountainous
section of the dam. The construction of the dam was such that the powerhouse were installed
behind the dam. Each powerhouse was built to incorporate a dam section with a foundation
elevation of 90 m. The powerhouses themselves, have an elevation of 22.2 m. The result was a
steep slope with temporary and permanent heights of 67.8 m and 39 m respectively, and a
gradient of 540. Consequently, the deep layers located in the left-bank powerhouse dam section
were exposed to the danger of a dangerous slide. The engineers at the site, however, mitigated
these dangers by slightly decreasing the foundation elevation of the dam section and increasing
the width of the bottom part of the dam near the upstream of the river. Another innovative
solution was to build a contact grouting system at the mid-section of the rock and the
powerhouse to maintain the structural integrity of the rock slope and the concrete therein [5].

Implication of the project on the world.

The project has had various social, economic, environmental and legal impacts on the people
around the dam, the Chinese government and neighbouring countries. The project submerged 13
major cities and 140 smaller cities and towns as well as 700 schools, 1600 factories and over
1300 villages at the time of its completion. Between 1.3 and 1.9 million people were relocated in
the process and more than 100,000 acres of fertile land was lost to the giant reservoir. This figure
represents about 10% of the fertile land used to grow China’s grain, with 50% of that being rice.
It is estimated that the government of China was only able to provide 125,000 farming families
with enough land, much less fertile than the one they lost. Though the rest were compensated by
other means, it meant that they had to change their livelihoods for good. Moreover, the relocation
of persons displaced had economic impacts as the government had to spend about $10 billion,
roughly 40% of total cost of the dam, for the activity and it proved to be a daunting process in
itself. The reduced fertile land available for farming also meant that China had to import more
rice and other grains to fill the deficit, thus becoming an economic burden to the country [6].

CONCLUSION

The Three Gorges Dam has already been dubbed China’s most ambitious construction project
since the completion of the Great Wall and has gone on to become not only the world’s largest
construction project but also the costliest. The project has had several positive social-economic
impacts and has revolutionised the world of engineering and architecture. Apart from being a
source of massive clean and renewable energy, the dam project has greatly improved flood
control in the regions of the river within its reaches in addition to promoting and improving
navigation of ships along the river. It has, in the process, improved movement of goods from the
inland parts of China to the sea at Shanghai. The government has also reaped huge economic
benefits from tourism as thousands of people visit the scenery around the dam monthly to tour
this technological marvel. The project has also improved water supply in the provinces
neighbouring the dam. Since the dam’s hydraulic structures went into full operation, results from
monitoring data indicate that stress-strain, deformation, seepage and other key operational are
well below the design values. Therefore, it means that the dam’s operational condition is reliable
and safe. The success of the Three Gorges Project will significantly improve technological
advances in water resource management and hydropower construction. The project has
motivated other innovative technologies that promote global water conservancy and the use of
renewable energy. It is claimed that the dam project may become the last ever to be constructed
in the world because of the reduced popularity of large dams. Even if that was the case, there is
no denying that the project defied huge engineering challenges to stand out as a technological
marvel. The next few years will see the project face more environmental challenges like
displacement of fish species, silting, withstanding earthquakes and climate change and engineers,
environmentalists, politicians and other professionals must continually come up with innovative
solutions to mitigate such possible problems.

REFERENCES

[1] L. Kite, Building the Three Gorges Dam. Chicago, Ill.: Raintree, 2011.

[2] S. Luk and J. Whitney, Megaproject: Case Study of China's Three Gorges Project.
Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2016.

[3] X. Niu, "Key Technologies of the Hydraulic Structures of the Three Gorges Project",
Engineering, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 340-349, 2016.

[4] J. Thibodeau, D. Qing, International Rivers Network, Probe International and P. Williams,
River Dragon Has Come!: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China's Yangtze River and Its
People. M.E. Sharpe Inc. / Books, 1998.

[5] C. Deji, "Engineering geological problems in the Three Gorges Project on the Yangtze,
China", Engineering Geology, vol. 51, no. 3, pp. 183-193, 1999.

[2] J. Trouw, The Three Gorges Dam's Impact on Peasant Livelihood. Norderstedt: Books on
Demand, 2014.