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Coal Creek Station operates two late 1970s vintage generators with three mechanical draft cooling towers, each 42 feet high and 225 feet in diameter. After 40 years of use, cooling tower #91 was showing its age. Demolishing and rebuilding the entire cooling tower would have been costly and required long downtime. Instead, an extensive restoration and rebuild of the cooling tower was planned during a 6.5-week shutdown in May, 2017.
Rebuilding the cooling tower required the following steps:
- Demolition of the exterior lumber and sheet metal structure
- Concrete rehabilitation
- Installing the new field-erected exterior FRP structure
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In the fall of 2016, the tower was shut down for one week to inspect and plan an efficient shutdown the following May. A visual inspection and sounding survey was conducted to identify defects, estimate quantities, develop a repair strategy, and create a detailed project schedule.
To preserve the structure, the concrete repair scope of work included:
- Removing delaminated and spalled concrete at beams, columns, and walls, and replace with high performance concrete
- Installing Type 1A alkali-activated embedded galvanic anodes to mitigate patch accelerated corrosion
- Precast concrete joint repair and waterproofing
- Removing severely deteriorated precast concrete beams and replacing with a new beam constructed with high performance concrete
- Repairing vertical joints between the cold water basin wall and the flume wall
- Epoxy injection to bond and seal cracks
- Installing new reinforced concrete pedestals into the cold water basin and trench to support the new FRP structure
- Installing epoxy coating on hot water basin’s vertical directional fins.
In total, over 5,000 hours were dedicated to the concrete repair and protection operations without any safety incidents.
The International Concrete Repair Institute recognized the project with a 2018 Award of Merit in the Repair of Industrial Structures.
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