Design considerations for cathodic protection systems of seawater applications have been changing in the past
20 years, because Impressed Current Cathodic Protection (ICCP)systems have made a big development in the
last decades. Nowadays ICCP systems offer a lot of monitoring and control features. Today a gradual shift from
sacrificial anode systems to Impressed Current Cathodic Protection (ICCP) systems can therefore been
recognized. From a general point of view ICCP systems are better performing than sacrificial anode systems, but
the performance is strongly dependent on the number of anodes and rectifiers being used, thereby impacting
heavily on the total installation cost of the ICCP system. A computer aided ICCP system design allows to
optimize the performance of the ICCP system while keeping the total number of anodes and rectifiers as limited
as possible.
The paper presented here describes an ICCP system that was applied for the first time to a bare steel offshore
platform. Computer modeling simulations for predicting the local protection level on the submerged surfaces of
this structure have enabled the design of an optimized ICCP system configuration that was successfully installed
into the field.
This presentation will describe the performance of an intermediate design stage of the ICCP system as predicted
from the computer simulations and discuss the specifics of the simulation method. It will be demonstrated that the
computer simulation results can provide an indication on how to improve the ICCP system design.
Keywords: simulation software, offshore platform, ICCP, design validation