Mitigation of Stray Current Interference from DC Electric Railroad(2) DICCP System

직류전기철도의 누설전류 간섭대책(2) 분포외부전원시스템

The national need to establish a new stray current mitigation method to protect the underground metallic infrastructures in congested downtown area forced us to design and develop the distributed impressed current cathodic protection (DICCP) system. The main purpose of this system is to replace the stray current drainage bond methods, which is widely adopted by pipeline owners in Korea. Currently, forced drainage makes up about 85% of total drainage facilities installed in Korea because polarized drainage can neither drain perfectly the stray currents during normal operation of electric vehicle nor drain the reverse current during regenerative braking at all. The forced drainage, however, has been abused as an alternative cathodic protection system, which impresses currents from rails to the pipelines and accordingly uses the rails as anodes. As a result, it is necessary to consider a new method to both cathodically protect the pipelines and effectively drain the stray currents. In this paper, we describe the design parameters and installation schemes of DICCP system that can meet these demands.