Abstract: To improve the scientificity and normalization of structural linear analysis of plane steel gate via ANSYS software, some problems are deeply discussed from grid division and leakage hole simplification on the basis of the intake emergency gate of a hydropower station. The results show that:（1） the element type shell281 is preferred for spatial thin-walled structures, such as plane steel gates, due to its higher accuracy of stress；（2） the size of the mesh has little effect on the deflection, but a reasonable mesh size can make the finite element calculation results of stress independent of the mesh size and reduce the calculation amount；（3） compared with free partition, mapping partition will provide higher grid quality, but it also brings in a large amount of work without obviously improving of calculation accuracy of stress and deflection；（4） leakage hole can be simplified and ignored in establishing the plane steel gate model if the ratio between hole diameter and beam height of plane steel gate is less than or equal to 0.15 and vice versa.