EARLY PLANNING SHORTENS PLANT’S OUTAGE SCHEDULE

Work during outages and shutdowns requires proper planning, management, and innovative solutions to keep overall costs down. A job Barnhart performed at a nuclear power plant exemplifies those standards.

Barnhart was hired to remove and replace two feedwater heaters (FWH) during an outage at the plant in Michigan. In addition to schedule, the biggest challenge was floor-loading issues, as the plant’s flooring was not able to accommodate such heavy loads. Barnhart devised an alternate rail system on turbine flooring using over 1,450 ft. of slide track, steel plate and cribbing.

After exploring many different schedules with the plant, Barnhart designed a pre-outage and post-outage plan for this system, which eliminated the need for the use of the turbine crane during the outage scope.

Barnhart offloaded the new FWHs from over-the-road trucking using pull up gantries, Goldhofer PSTe and staging. They hauled the new FWH’s to the turbine truck bay and lifted them onto empty powered saddle rollers (PSR) on the rail system.

The team removed and replaced the FWHs using two sets (8 total) of PSRs, Hillman rollers and jacks.  The system was reversed to lift and haul away the old heaters.

The early planning shortened the original proposed outage schedule resulting in a extremely pleased client.