Development of Permanent Reference Electrode for Corrosion Monitoring of Underground Metallic Structures

지중 금속구조물 부식감시를 위한 영구매설용 기준전극 개발

The advancement of electronics and telecommunication technologies has forced the risk management system for underground metallic structures to evolve into the remote monitoring and control system. Especially, facilities such as gas pipelines, oil pipelines and water distribution lines might make hazardous effect on human safety without continuous monitoring and control. As a result, pipeline engineers have applied cathodic protection system to prevent the degradation of their facilities by corrosion and carried out a periodic monitoring of the pipe-to-soil (P/S) potentials at numberous test boxes along their pipelines. The latter action on a road in downtowns, however, is so much dangerous that the inspectors should be ready to suffer the threatening of their lives and maintenance. In order to minimize these social costs and hazards, a stand-alone type corrosion monitoring equipment which can be installed in test box, store the P/S data for given Belied and send the data by wired/wireless telecommunications is under development. In order to obtain the exact P/S data, however, a reference electrode should be located as close to the pipeline as possible. Actually, the measured potential by a conventional portable reference electrode contain inevitably an IR drop portion caused by the current flow from the cathodic protection rectifier or the subway railroad. To minimize this error, it is recommended that the reference electrode should be buried within 10 cm from the pipeline. In this paper, we describe the design parameters for fabricating the permanent type reference electrode and the characteristics of the developed reference electrode.