The Port Botany Expansion Project is a major expansion of the existing container terminal and port on the north east corner of Botany Bay, Sydney.
The expansion will provide five new berths for large container ships as well as tug berths, and major civil and road works and 65ha of reclamation for hardstand container storage. A major component of the project is 1.85km of concrete quay walls and the associated crane rail beams.
This paper focuses on the design methodolies developed to design a 1300m long reinforced concrete beam crane beam supported on piles without contraction or expansion joints.
The Landward Crane Beam was designed for the applied crane loads, shrinkage and thermal loads. Using finite element modelling we were able to refine the stress profiles resulting from the combination of the above load cases and determine that spacing expansion joints at 1300m was very similar to spacing the joints at 200m centres.
FE modelling was also used to determine the differential temperature profile across the beam depth bought on by seasonal temperature change which was significantly different to the daily variation caused by solar radiation.
The result of this analysis is an innovative crane beam design that was cost effective by the deletion of the expansion joints.