Power generation plants have extreme environments where concrete infrastructure is exposed to ongoing risks of corrosion. Without proper preventative measures, critical assets can become a safety hazard and lead to unplanned downtime.

During a prior outage, STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES performed an assessment of a 40-year-old hyperbolic cooling tower at a power plant located in the Southern United States. The investigation revealed severe corrosion in the structure’s aqueducts, primarily caused by ongoing exposure to brackish water surrounding the facility. In response, our team devised a comprehensive solution to perform concrete repairs and extend the cooling tower’s service life by 30+ years with STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES’ Impressed Current Cathodic Protection (ICCP) system.

PULLMAN was contracted to perform the repairs and install the ICCP system. The 21-day project involved an 80-person crew working two shifts, implementing a dual-purpose scaffold for tasks like demolition, rebar replacement, surface preparation, and ICCP installation. Concrete demolition covered 2,200 square feet, with around 80% of the rebar requiring replacement. Meticulous planning and execution included a detailed engineering plan for doweling the new rebar in place, media blasting for surface preparation, and installation of over 2,000 probe anodes, 5,000 LF of mesh ribbon anodes, and 5,000 rebar connections.

The project was successfully completed within the outage window to avoid any unnecessary downtime and with zero safety incidents.