Control of Solar Powered Cathodic Protection System

Abstract

Cathodic Protection (CP) is an effective method to reduce the corrosion of metallic structures that submerged in water or buried in soil. In order to reduce the corrosion of any structure, the voltage between the metal to be protected and a reference electrode must be controlled on a preset level called the full protection level. In this paper, a boost converter circuit and L298N integrated circuit were used as a control system to regulate the protection voltage on a preset identified range. The boost converter has been used to raise the supply voltage, while the L298N circuit has been used to regulate the boost converter voltage automatically by adjusting the duty cycle through the Arduino microcontroller. Before the designing and implementing of the proposed controller, the effect of some different factors should be studied to understand the nature of the system and determine the controller voltage and current ranges. These factors are: The solution temperature, The dissolved oxygen, the anodecathode distance and the power of hydrogen. The photovoltaic array was employed to impress the electrical current to the system. However, the protection voltage should be kept between 0.8 V and 1 V. Therefore, the control circuit will change its output voltage automatically to return to the mentioned range. ARTICLE INFO Received: 07/01/2018 Accepted: 29/11/2018