Technology In Panama Canal

Civil works have always been adored by the common man. We have seen many beautiful buildings and structures with a strong foundation and a robust build, but, Panama Canal and Hong Kong Airport were the toughest projects ever ever undertaken by the Engineers.

The Panama Canal is a narrow shortcut which has been built to let the ships pass through it. The way the canal has been designed is just amazing. How will you allow a ship to flow across a canal where the water level on one side of the ocean is very high and the water level on the other side of the bridge is very low. This difficulty is handled by the Engineers of the Panama canal with great accuracy. If you did not watch the video documentary of this Canal on Youtube you might considering downloading it from the internet. I order to solve the above issue the canal has got a set of three gates placed at three different heights. Once the door is closed, water cannot flow across the gates. When a ship tries to go from a lower level to a higher level, the bottommost gate is closed and water is allowed to enter into the tank from the sea (which is at a higher level) through an underground pipe which connects the two troughs of water till the water in this trough created by the enclosed walls and the closed gate reaches the level of water as in the middle trough. The level of water cannot become higher than the level of water in the second trough because as soon as the level of water reaches the level of the water in the middle trough, hydraulic pressure becomes zero. Similarly now the gate of the middle level is closed and water flows into it till the level of water inside the middle trough reaches the sea level. Now the third gate is opened and the ship is allowed to pass through. Now the ship can go into the ocean whose water level is higher than the water level of the ocean from which it came. The below figure will illustrate the concept.

Another great difficulty faced by the Engineers of the Panama canal was to allow vessels of massive size with a width which is just a few inches shorter than the canal width. In order to achieve this, the Engineers decided to design two vehicles (like trams on one side each) which should be equipped with special motors which could handle the load of a heavy vessel. The vessel would be joined to the trams using strings and the ship would be pulled by the trams across the three water levels. The system is said to be so efficient that many vessels which are taken across the gates using the vehicles suffer not a single scratch (except a few cases where the vessel just grazed the walls of the canal, but the damages were negligible). Do not miss the video if you get the chance to see it.  Also Google up and see the images of Panama canal and you will be able to see the way the great vessels are taken across it. Have a nice day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!