Corrosion Prevention using Structural Healthcare Systems Case No. 13

Barr Beacon Reservoir, Walsall
Monitoring and Protection of Roof Support Columns of the Underground Reservoir

Year of Installation: 1999
Anode Used: Ebonex® conductive ceramic anodes
Monitoring Used: C-Probe CP10P and CP101
Management System: AchillesCP and AchillesEDC
Additional Treatments: None.

Description:
Barr Beacon is located near Perry Barr, Walsall and is one of many underground reservoirs within the asset management scope of South Staffordshire Water PLC.

C-Probe was contracted to design, supply, install, commission and manage a pilot scheme with the objective of providing a greater understanding of the behaviour of reinforced concrete columns supporting the roof of Barr Beacon reservoir.

To this end a system was designed for both the East and West tanks with both cathodic protection and early detection of corrosion systems installed to a total population of 8 columns.

In both tanks 2 columns were installed with the a discrete anode cathodic protection system and 2 columns with corrosion potential and corrosion rate embedded monitoring probes.

For the cathodic protection columns it was also within the scope of the design to investigate the effectiveness of the systems installed to both 100% and 50% of the column height. The underlying issue here was that the reservoir is filled to at least 60% capacity all the time and rarely empty and as such the most susceptible area for corrosion protection to be needed was likely to be at non-water saturated areas immediately below and above the water-line.

The systems have been incorporated into an integrated neural network management system managed using the C-Probe Internet interactive management system – AiMS.

The systems have been operated successfully for over 12-months with valuable information being achieved to predict the ongoing maintenance requirements of this important reservoir structure.