Sherwin-Williams won several awards for excellence in coatings at the recent Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP) Annual Conference in Denver, Colo.
Among the company’s awards was “Excellence in Management of a Complex Materials Protection Project” for the USS John C. Stennis CVN-74 aircraft carrier.
Multiple partners ensured the successful mid-life refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) of the U.S. Navy-operated USS John C. Stennis, a nuclear- powered aircraft carrier, after 25 years of service. Requiring years of planning, execution and superior management, the project encompasses a full overhaul including the preservation of the vessel’s entire interior and exterior coatings with state-of-the-art materials that met military specifications.
Mid-Atlantic Coatings, Inc. (MAC), the application contractor and management lead, teamed with Sherwin- Williams Protective & Marine to use various corrosion-control technologies on the ship while it was in dry dock at the HII-Newport News Shipyard in Virginia. Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine MIL-Spec coatings technologies were widely used on more than 1.2 million square feet of the carrier’s surface, including in the preservation of the vessel’s ballast and jet fuel tanks, freeboard areas and dielectric shields.
After completing environmentally-friendly surface preparations using recyclable steel grit and non-gasoline powered pressure washers, MAC coated the ship’s ballast, jet fuel and potable water tanks—including more than 160 confined spaces comprising 450,000 square feet. The primary coating used to accomplish this significant task was Fast-Clad® ER, a single-coat, rapid-cure, ultra-high solids, low-VOC, edge-retentive high-build epoxy.
MAC also coated the much of the ship’s freeboard and topside—more than 650,000 square feet of steel – with a two-coat system featuring Fast-Clad ER as the primer with a topcoat of Polysiloxane XLE-80 HAPS Free that features a unique low solar absorption (LSA) pigment package. Developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the LSA pigments enhance the vessel’s total solar reflectance, enabling it to stay 10-15°F cooler and therefore require less energy for controlling the climate of interior spaces. The coating system will also help the carrier maintain its signature haze grey color due to its superior gloss and abrasion resistance.
For the ship’s impressed current cathodic protection system—which provides supplemental corrosion protection for the hull—applicators preserved 17 dielectric shields using a spray-applied system featuring Nova-Plate® UHS. The sprayable dielectric shield coating is significantly easier to apply and more user friendly than the traditional trowel-applied capastic, which must be manually troweled onto surfaces and smoothed.
This complex project was accomplished throughout the pandemic amid various supply chain and raw material shortages. Key contributors to the award-winning project included the U.S. Navy, HII-Newport News Shipyard, Mid-Atlantic Coatings, Inc., Sherwin- Williams Protective & Marine, and equipment suppliers V.O. Baker Company, WIWA LLC and Barton International.
Reprinted from Marine Construction Magazine, Issue II, 2023
