A Galvanic Sensor for Monitoring the External and Internal Corrosion Damage of Buried Pipelines

In order to develop a new corrosion sensor for detecting and monitoring the external and internal corrosion damage of buried pipeline, the electrochemical property of sensors and the correlation of its output to corrosion rate of steel pipe, were evaluated by electrochemical methods in two soils of varying resistivity (5,000 ohm-cm, 10,000 ohm-cm) and synthetic tap water environments. In this paper, two types of galvanic probes were manufactured: copper-pipeline steel (Cu-CS) and stainless steel-pipeline steel (SS-CS). The corrosion behavior in synthetic groundwater and synthetic tap water for the different electrodes was investigated by potentiodynamic test. The comparison of the sensor output and corrosion rates revealed that a linear relationship was found between the probe current and the corrosion rates. In the soil resistivity of $5,000{\Omega}-cm$ and tap water environments, only the Cu-CS probe had a good linear quantitative relationship between the sensor output current and the corrosion rate of pipeline steel. In the case of $10,000{\Omega}-cm$, although the SS-CS probe showed a better linear correlation than that of Cu-CS probe, the Cu-CS probe is more suitable than SS-CS probe due to the high current output.