Nuclear Plant Journal, March-April 2016 NuclearPlantJournal.com
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Robert Sweeney
Robert Sweeney is a Principal at IBEX
Engineering Services, Inc. with thirty
years of a consulting,
engineering and
project management
experience servicing
dozens of utilities,
manufactures,
engineering and
construction, and
service firms in the
US and elsewhere.
Through his career,
he has successfully
led projects/
organizations
focused on solving
complex technical
or regulatory issues
and developing
logical solutions to
reduce technological, financial and other
risks.
Sweeney has a BSME from UMass –
Dartmouth.
potential noise source -- indicative of a
possible leak -- on another segment we
identified for further investigation.
The condition assessment – which
relies on acoustic data and benchmarked
algorithms -- results provided useful
quantitative and qualitative condition
information on each pipe segment.
Degradation
conditions,
including
estimated remaining pipe wall thickness
in percent, support a grading system for
each segment as “Fair” to “Moderate”
to “Poor” to “Severely Degraded” to
“Unsupportable” condition used to form
the basis for options and decisions to:
remediate adverse field conditions; repair,
rehabilitate or replace pipe – where, how
much and when; or adjust monitoring
and inspections. The end result of the
condition assessment showed that the
majority of the piping -- despite earlier
thoughts about just how good the system
was after all these year -- was in fact in
very good or fair condition, with only a
few segments showing moderate to poor
conditions. None of the segments were
identified as having severely degraded or
unsupportable wall thickness results.
As recognized by the National As-
sociation of Corrosion
Engineers (NACE)
and other industry
organizations, cor-
rosion can be con-
trolled by a change
in environment, such
as changes in mate-
rial, placement of
barriers, etc. Most
degradation leading
to system integrity
or wall loss is often
caused by one or
more combinations
of conditions or ma-
terial factors. Some
of those include:
Cathodic Pro-
tection (existing) – ironically, com-
mon sources of subsurface corro-
sion on unprotected systems can
be caused by interference and stray
