Abstract
Cathodic protection(CP) is widely used as a means of protecting corrosion for not only marine structures like ship hulls and offshore drilling facilities, but also underground structures like buried pipelines and oil storage tanks. The principle of CP is that the anodic dissolution of metal can be protected by supplying electrons to the cathode metal. When unprotected structures are nearby to CP systems, interference problems between unprotected and protected structures may be happened. The stray current interference can accelerate the corrosion of nearby structures. So far many efforts have been made to reduce the interference in the electric railway systems adjacent to the underground metal structures like buried pipelines and gas/oil tanks. During recent few decades the protection technologies against stray current induced corrosion have been significantly improved and a number of techniques have been developed. However, there is very limited information an marine environments. Some complex harbor structures are protected by two cathodic protection systems, i.e. sacrificial anode cathodic protection(SACP) and impressed current cathodic protection(ICCP). In this case, when the protection current from sacrificial anodes returns to the cathode through electrolyte, it passes through nearby other low resistance metal structures. In many cases the stray current of ICCP systems influences the function of SACP. In this study, the risk of stray current from the SACP system to adjacent reinforced concrete structures has been verified through laboratory experiments. Concrete and steel pile structures modeled a part of bridge have been investigated in terms of CP potential and current between the two. The variation of stray current according to the magnitude of ICCP/SACP has been studied to mitigate it and to suggest the proper protection criteria.