Development of shellfish removing machine for large-diameter sea-water piping

At nuclear and thermal power plants, the large amount of marine organisms that grow on the inside of condenser cooling, sea-water pipes, such as blue mussels and barnacles, significantly increases the pressure loss of the fluid in the pipes. This causes a deterioration in pumping efficiency and causes damage and corrosion to the paint coating on the inside of the pipes. These marine organisms must be removed, and this takes place by hand during each scheduled outage of the power plants. The working environment within these long lengths of large-diameter pipes is very harsh, requiring a great deal of time and physical labor to remove these organisms. Moreover, finding people to perform this task is becoming difficult. For these reasons. There has been a strong desire to mechanize this task. And this led to the development of a shellfish removing machine for these large-diameter sea-water pipes. The most important considerations in developing this machine were that the removal of the marine organisms be efficient and that the method of removal cause minimum damage to the coating on the inside of the pipes. Good results were obtained using a special cleaning brush that has a removing fixture attached to the end of a wire rope. After several application tests, the machine was used to remove shellfish from condenser cooling sea-water pipes during the sixth scheduled outage of the Japan Atomic Power Company's Tsuruga No. 2 Unit in September, 1994. There, the capability and reliability of this machine were verified