The setting
Chemical plant tank farm. The bund areas — secondary containment zones surrounding the storage tanks — are served by a network of trench drains that catch spills and rainwater runoff. When an acid spill hits these drains, it doesn't just flow through. It reacts with the concrete, slowly but steadily eating away at the surface and the joints.
What was going wrong
The original concrete trench drains were failing from years of intermittent acidic effluent exposure. The concrete was spalling at the waterline, the joints between precast sections were leaking, and the annual bund integrity test had become an exercise in anxiety. Every year the plant had to shut down sections of the tank farm for concrete repairs just to scrape through the test. That's lost throughput days on top of the repair cost, repeated annually.
What we installed
We pulled out the deteriorated concrete channels in the worst-affected bunds and dropped in prefabricated FRP channel sections with a chemical-resistant resin formulation — the same chemistry used in process plant pipework for acid service. The channels were covered with FRP trench covers rated for the vehicle loads that cross the bund area during maintenance. The prefabricated sections locked together on-site without needing concrete curing time, so the bunds were back in service fast.
What changed
Bottom line: The annual concrete repair shutdown for the tank farm drainage has been eliminated. The bund integrity test has been passed five years running with no remedial work required on the FRP drainage sections. The operations team no longer budgets for drainage repairs in the annual shutdown plan.
Bund integrity test passed 5 consecutive years. Leak-free drainage confirmed. Annual concrete repair shutdown eliminated.
How it compares
Concrete trench drains in this environment require annual inspection, joint repair, and eventual full replacement as the acid attack progresses. The FRP alternative is chemically inert to the effluents it handles — there is no degradation mechanism in play. The higher upfront material cost is recovered within the first two years of avoided concrete repair shutdowns.
Containment drainage is the kind of system nobody notices until it fails a regulatory test. See our drainage systems overview for the design logic. More industrial applications are covered in FRP drainage in industrial settings.