Buried pipelines paralleling or crossing high voltage power line systems are often
subjected to induced AC interference, which may cause serious corrosion risk. There
have been many conclusions including size of coating defects, AC current density, etc.
to estimate corrosion condition, but no industry standard evaluation criterion has been
established. In this paper, the AC induced corrosion of coated pipeline was studied
with coated specimens in simulated soil solution under various experimental
conditions to determine the AC corrosion risk considering the cathodic protection,
coating defects, AC current density, soil acidity/alkalinity, and the soil resistivity. It
has been identified that failures in oil and gas transmission pipelines by destructive
pitting may be caused by AC interference. Pitting corrosion was also studied in this
paper by electrochemical measurements and AC corrosion mechanism was further
analyzed. Specific morphology of characteristics of AC corrosion was observed by
Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) technical.
Keyword: AC interference, coating defects, evaluation criterion, pitting corrosion