Adaptive Corrosion Protection System Using Continuous Corrosion Measurement, Parameter Extraction, and Corrective Loop

Abstract

A simple current-sourced adaptive corrosion protection system (ACPS) along with a technology to extract the protection current from the Tafel plot is presented. For reliable protection of the target metal, first, the Tafel plot of the target metal is obtained. Subsequently, a novel technique proposed in this paper is used to extract the protection current from the Tafel plot. This extracted protection current is fed to the target metal to protect the metal in the existing corrosive environment. This three-part system is adaptively used to update the required protection current to effectively protect the target metal continuously. All these functionalities are integrated in a stand-alone ACPS that effectively diagnoses the corrosion status and updates the protection parameters without any manual interaction or physical modification of the set-up to offer modularity, reliability, and cost saving. To validate the technique, a laboratory scale system is realized and tested using various metal samples and various corrosive mediums. Using the experimental system, A36 metal coupons are effectively protected with protection (inhibition) efficiency of 40–100%in different corrosive mediums that can extend the life expectancy of the target metal from ~2 times to more than 100 times for the tested corrosive mediums.