Mid-Atlantic Regional Maintenance Center (MARMC) completed Fleet Technical Assistance (FTA) to USS Monterey's (CG 61) loop cooling system restoring functionality to several pieces of equipment including the SPY-1 radar system, allowing the ship to be ready for her next mission, Oct. 23.

The cooling system began experiencing faults earlier in 2017, and with continued degradation impacted the Ballistic Missile Defense capabilities due to potential overheating of key components of the AEGIS system.

"What we ended up finding were tiny resin beads that had built up in some of the smaller components of the cooling system which were restricting the flow of water," said MARMC's Air Conditioning and Refrigeration and Air Systems Branch Head Greg Spruill. "The ship initially contacted us in March of this year due to low flow alarms. Around July, the alarms were continuing to go off and had become more serious because our regular troubleshooting efforts were no longer resolving the issues."

Typically, MARMC engineers and technicians will clean the flow restrictors and switches, which on most occasions will clear the faults the cooling water system is receiving and return it to a ready state. In this instance the faults persisted, causing MARMC's team to contact Port Hueneme who serves as the cooling water In-Service Engineering Agent (ISEA).

"Being that Port Hueneme is located in California, all of their people are out there. They had one individual, Dan Rast, who is here for east coast support and we asked him to join our team to ensure quality of the system was maintained as we continued our troubleshooting efforts," said Spruill.

It was recommended that a complete system flush be performed to clean out any other debris that may be clogging pieces of the cooling water loop.

"Normally, when they flush the SPY system, they flush it with the flow restrictors and switches in place in order to clean them as well. To flush the system you use a cleaning agent called chelate which helps absorb the buildup of cupric oxide. We were afraid this sort of flush wouldn't do the trick since we knew these resin beads were lingering throughout the system and we didn't want the flow restrictors and switches to be further damaged by continuing to pass these particles through them," said Spruill.

To make matters more complicated, the flow restrictors and flow switches would need to be removed. Where in many other systems these components are easy to access, when dealing with the SPY-1 radar they are contained in the back of a closed AEGIS cabinet.

"In order to reach the flow regulators and switches, we had to remove the Traveling Wave Tubes (TWT) and Cross Field Amplifiers (CFA) from the cabinet," said MARMC Electronics Technician Paul Clingenpeel, who works within MARMC's Combat System AEGIS Branch. "This allowed the flow switches and regulators to be removed and using bypass tubes, the system could be flushed as normal."

During this evolution MARMC contacted Naval Surface War Center Crane Division who is the ISEA for many of the components the team was working on to ensure they were taking the proper precautions while cleaning the system.

"After the system was flushed we put in new flow regulators and switches in nearly all the cabinets," said MARMC Engineer Eddie Seaton. "It was a pretty big effort that required several branches within MARMC to be involved. We also cleaned the TWT's and CFA's separately just to ensure that every possible piece of the system that is impacted by the water flow would be free of any sort of contaminant."

In addition to the cooling water system, MARMC's Surface Search Radar Branch provided FTA for the AN/SPS-49, which had to be removed and repaired before the ship's full capabilities could be restored.

"What we have done at this point, is teamed with Port Hueneme's cooling division to create documentation and standards on how to approach these sorts of problems if and when we encounter them in the future. It is great to work through the process and get the ship back to full capability, but it is critical to capture these lessons learned to ensure the next time around we can get the job done even faster," said Spruill.

MARMC's Engineering Department also completed the emergent Total Ship Readiness Assessment (TSRA) visit on board USS Monterey, Oct. 9. With a focus on Combat Systems equipment and Distilling Plants, this TSRA used 40 Subject Matter Experts to assess 62 systems.

Monterey has been assigned duties within the 7th Fleet to help augment forces in the Pacific since the recent incidents involving USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) and USS McCain (DDG 56) have them out of commission undergoing repairs.



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