Water Intake Tower

1. What is water intake tower?

Intake tower is just a tower which basically built in a waterbody or reservoir to take water from
it by pump or any other mechanical process and release it somewhere else according to the
requirement of the authority.

2. Why it is required?
It is required for a power plant to for cooling system, could be required for irrigation. Most
importantly it is very important structure for a Dam system.
For a Dam proper functioning of intake tower immediately after an earthquake is very
important, since the controlled release of the reservoir could help to prevent additional
propagation of damage by reducing the hydrostatic loads.

3. So, what should we consider for analyzing dynamic response of an intake tower?
It is very common question before doing structural analysis of any structure. So, I thought about
the conditions for water intake towers. Intake tower is like another with some slenderness in
shape, but in most of the case it is built in a waterbody as mentioned before. So at first we need
to know what effect a water may have on a structure.
CAN ANY BODY SHARE SOME IDEAS?

After searching on internet I found a research paper of LIWA and AK Chopra where they showed
the “Dynamic of towers surrounded by water”. Research done in 1974. From the research they
concluded followings:

a. Interaction with surrounding water increases the fundamental period of vibration of the
tower; associated with there is a decrease in the modal damping ratio for the structure, butit
didn’t mention the value of reduced amount of damping.
b. Compressibility of water is essentially of no consequence in the hydrodynamic effects on
slender towers.
c. Because compressibility of water is not important, the effects of surrounding water are
entirely equivalent to an additional mass of magnitude and distribution depending on the
deflected shape during vibration. Earlier research was done for rigid body but this included
flexible structure for which “added mass” effect are negligible for the first mode of vibration
of towers.

4. So what next?
Following this the research was expanded and in 1991 AK Chopra and Alok Goyal has presented
“Simplied Earthquake Analysis Of Intake-Outlet Tower”. In this paper the researcher took
account of all the significant effects of tower water interaction and tower-foundation-soil
interaction, the hydrodynamic effects of outside and inside water are approximated by added
mass functions, which can be determined to a useful degree of accuracy without requiring
rigorous three-dimensional analysis of the two fluid domains.
 These are the fundamental research that have been done on analyzing dynamic response of an
intake tower.

5. Is there any other condition could take part apart from the hydrodynamics effect?
Yes, of-course. As we have discussed that intake tower is really important for control release of
water from Dam, some other research also done for interaction of Dam with Intake tower.

A research done by M. A. Mill´an∗,†,‡, Y. L. Young§ and J. H. Pr´evost on “Seismic response of

intake towers including dam–tower interaction”. They found following results:

a. For the selected configuration, the presence of the dam leads to the introduction of a new
resonance mode near the tower’s second resonance frequency due to the dam–reservoir
excitations. So, due to presence of dam-tower-water system would experience another
resonance due excitation.
b. When the dam presence is considered, the tower under vertical excitation does not present
symmetry, which leads to resonances that could not be captured using conventional tower
analysis methods due to the assumption of an infinite reservoir around the tower.
c. The results show that when considering simultaneous horizontal and vertical excitation, the
tower displacements and pressures can be significantly amplified due to tower–dam–reservoir
interactions. This behavior is more significant for a concrete dam than for an earth dam.
d. Additional research is needed to analyze the influence of other important parameters in the
response: e.g. flexibility of the dam and tower, variations in water depth, soil–structure
interactions, spatial variability of the excitation, etc.

6. Several other seismic performance analysis was done by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
(USACE). I require more study on those methods.

7. Non-linear (Pushover) analysis also done on water intake tower as one done by R. SABATINO
concluded that: Monotonic and cyclic pushover tests of scaled lightly reinforced intake tower
models indicated that their response was characterized by a localized tensile failure at the base
of the tower. The rest of the tower behaved as a rigid block, with negligible flexural response.
Significant strength and stiffness degradation were observed for the cyclic test, with the
monotonic envelope providing a non-conservative estimate of the capacity of the structure.

8. From above analysis process we can find the responses of a Intake Tower. And to reduce the
response we may increase the damping ratio of the structure by incorporating damper. A
research done by H.Y. Zhang ⇑, L.J. Zhang on “Tuned mass damper system of high-rise intake
towers optimized by improved harmony search algorithm”. So observed how a TMD system
can affect the displacement, acceleration and velocity response of an intake tower.

9. Apart from all of this another analysis also may require for vortex shedding if the tower located
in the river where water flows in general condition. I have to study on that as I want to know if
the flow has any impact on the natural frequency of Tower.
10. Moreover, intake tower might be connected to bank of reservoir or river by a bridge. So, we
include that bridge in analysis how would that influence on seismic response of tower.

11. Besides, actual scenario of plumbing system of Intake Tower may be included for research too.

12. If we can consider all these condition we will may find more accurate result from the analysis
and can offer Engineers more accurate design standard for damping.