Monitoring and Control on Impressed Current Cathodic Protection for Oil Pipelines

Abstract

This research is devoted to design and implement a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA) for monitoring and controlling the corrosion of a carbon steel pipe buried in soil. A smart technique equipped with a microcontroller, a collection of sensors and a communication system was applied to monitor and control the operation of an ICCP process for a carbon steel pipe. The integration of the built hardware, LabVIEW graphical programming and PC interface produces an effective SCADA system for two types of control namely: a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) that supports a closed loop, and a traditional open loop control. Through this work, under environmental temperature of 30°C, an evaluation and comparison were done for two types of controls tested at low soil moisture (48%) and high soil moisture (80 %) to study the value of current, anode voltage, pipe to soil potential (PSP) and consumed power. The results show an decrease of 59.1% in consumed power when the moisture changes from the low to high level. It was reached that the closed loop controller PID is the best solution in terms of efficiency, reliability, fast response and power consumption.