Prefabricated Reinforced Guide Walls for Mountainous River Locks: Numerical Analysis and Performance Evaluation

In the field of shipping engineering, guide walls serve as core flow-guiding structures for river regulation and waterway maintenance. Their structural stability, construction efficiency, and maintainability directly determine shipping safety and construction costs. Currently, guide walls in mountainous rivers predominantly utilize cast-in-place monolithic structures, which suffer from issues such as complicated construction, high cement consumption, and poor adaptability. This study proposes a novel prefabricated reinforced guide wall, consisting of a base plate, prefabricated concrete units, intra-layer bolts, and inter-layer reinforcement bars, and develops a nonlinear numerical framework, integrating contact mechanics, metal plasticity, and finite element analysis to investigate the mechanical behavior of the proposed wall structure under hydraulic loads. The results show that the prefabricated reinforced guide wall exhibits stable stress and deformation responses and maintains reliable inter-layer stability. Benefiting from its hollow prefabricated configuration, which replaces part of the concrete with rockfill, the proposed system substantially reduces cement demand and supports low-carbon and sustainable construction. This study provides both theoretical insights and engineering evidence for the safe, efficient, and sustainable application of prefabricated reinforced guide walls in mountainous river locks.