Mercury, Nga Awa Purua Power Station, New Zealand North Island
Design, prefabrication and change out of the complete upper structure of a ten (10) cell Marley cooling tower.
The existing tower was not that long into its operational life when it was discovered damage had occurred resulting from the incorrect specification of the FRP material for the new construction.
The site execution was to systematically remove one cell at a time whilst maintaining at least eight (8) cells remained operational at all times.
The damage was determined to be caused by the acidic nature of the non-combustible gases (NCG) that were dispersed using the exiting air velocity from the fan stacks. The pipes ran in through the plenum chamber and had only push fit joints that overtime leaked in to the area under the decking. Breezewater were able to supply and prefabricate a more chemical resistant Vinyl Ester based FRP pultruded product from Bedford that had favoured well in the accelerated aging trials completed as part of the project material selection process.
Breezewater, through its site leadership team, executed the site works using local New Zealand construction labour of all ten (10) cells safely.
Breezewater also managed the design changes and CEng sign off and the relevant PS1 and PS5 certificates using the inhouse engineering team.
