A Study on the Development of Solid Reference Electrode and Remote Protection Potential Measuring System

For buried gas pipelines, cathodic protection system shall be installed to protect against corrosion. The surveys of pipe-to-soil potentials for the gas pipelines should be carried out at the test box more than once a year. In urban, the test box is usually located on the driveway, therefore, it is difficult to measure the potentials. That is, traffic control is needed when carrying out the measurements of the potentials on daytime, or measurements of pipe-to-soil potentials at the test box located on the driveway have to be carried out in the late night when the traffic is light. We have developed remote potential monitoring system using the solid reference electrode and the wireless communication technology for the purpose of removing above problems. We have installed the developed solid reference electrodes at a site and monitored the potentials by wireless communication. Measured potential values were transferred to the server in office and analyzed. We have found the pipe-to-soil potentials transferred to the web server make no difference to the potentials measured directly on the site.