Management, engineering and scaffold systems assembly during two three-week windows, six months apart
Accessing the inside of plant towers to perform maintenance during short shutdown timeframe
SPX Cooling Technologies, Exelon’s cooling tower manufacturer, needed a reliable partner with the experience and skills to plan and manage access during a shutdown and turned to BrandSafway.
BrandSafway suggested using its Systems™ Scaffold — both for its quick assembly time and its ability to adapt to concave or convex circular surfaces. In addition, Systems Scaffold has passed all seismic qualification tests and is fully compliant with the American National Standards Institute and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard 344.
Two weeks prior to the first Byron outage, BrandSafway’s crew began erecting the Systems Scaffold ramps in an outer ring of the cooling tower that was not under the water spray. However, the bottom of the tower was still filled with eight and a half feet of water, and Exelon couldn’t drain the water until the outage began.
Exelon brought in divers who, directed by a BrandSafway team, erected the Systems Scaffold base underwater. This required careful planning because there was a strong current moving through the water. Once the reactor outage began, BrandSafway quickly built the ramps up to nearly 45 feet high, 90 feet long and 21 feet wide.
The project was completed with no major incidents, within the allotted three-week time frame.
