Ballylumford Power Station extracts sea water from Larne Lough for use within the facility. The Reverse Osmosis (RO) Plant Room processes the extracted sea water into deionised water. The deionised water is used as the main coolant on the main generation turbines. The existing dual media carbon steel trunk header pipework (350mm dia) entering and exiting the eight filter vessels via 150mm control station pipework had developed leaks and localised failures due to destructive aqueous corrosion.

The project included the replacement of 40m of header pipework with 355mm SDR 11 Polypropylene Pipework external and inside the RO Plant Room, temporary removal and refitting of flow meters, static mixer, sampling and dosing pipework as well as the decommissioning of the 8 filter vessels, 40 actuators, and control pipework to allow replacement with 8 control station assemblies incorporating 80m of 160mm PN10 Polypropylene SDR11 pipework, 100 aqueous corrosion resistant gate valves and associated support and pipe brackets.

The works were delivered in partnership with the in house AES Engineering Team and IPS Flow Systems (http://www.ipsflowsystems.com/) of Durham and the locally based Nuline Córas Engineering team headed up by Dermot Devine and Patrick Magorrian. Client design was by Project Design Engineers of Randalstown County Antrim with pipe supply and technical support is provided by specialist polypropylene pipe manufacturers AGRU Gmbh of Bad Hall, Austria and Reinert Ritz Gmbh of Nordhein Westfalen, Germany.
The RO Plant Pipework Replacement Project represented a significant success for the Engineers of Nuline Utilities and Córas Pipeline Services as there is limited locally based expertise in Polypropylene Pipework assembly and the Joint Venture was able to further demonstrate capability in successfully project managing and delivering complex process pipeline solutions in restricted timeframes and work environments.