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The purpose of this paper is to study the damage evolution (DE) of coated API5L-X52 steel pipe with cathodic protection (CP) in nature soil. Also, different coating conditions, intact coating and coating with artificial holiday defect are considered to study the electrochemical behavior combined with soil properties and CP potential. An approach of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) analysis is also developed.

This work developed a laboratory experimental set-up of coated pipeline under CP in nature soil. The electrochemical behavior has been investigated using EIS. The CP potential provided by a DC power supplier has been adjusted and recorded to maintain the protective potential of pipe at −850 mV vs Cu/CuSO₄.

Various parameters were derived from the EIS fitting data by equivalent circuit models to illustrate the three DE stages of coated carbon steel in soil. Each stage changes faster for the artificial defect coating system compared to intact coating, especially at the initial water uptake and ion transport stage. The CP potential has been proved to be correlated to the soil properties, coating conditions and DE stages of pipeline samples.

This work is the first one to study DE of coated pipeline system under CP in soil. It introduces an electrochemical method to study coating defects which can promote to design the deterministic model to detect coating defects of buried pipe using AC impedance technique.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a real-time methodology to detect damages in coating and metallic structure in buried pipelines by using DC bias added to AC signal under field operation conditions, including cathodic protection.

Impedance measurements were performed on buried pipeline for different field conditions, to develop a methodology to detect and locate damages by impedance distribution along the metallic structure.

Field condition measurements were conducted as a pilot test on a buried steel pipeline segment with a diameter of 16 inches and length of 20 km. The frequency-based technology shows some differences but overall good behavior between impedance magnitudes vs localization of the interface changes at the soil-coating-steel interface at different frequencies using DC bias added to AC signal under field operation conditions, including cathodic protection.

The methodology is not applicable to highly resistive soil or high degradation coatings.

In this work, we depict a methodology that describes real time monitoring technology for buried metallic structures using AC signal. This monitoring is capable to detect and locate real time damage occurrences on the pipe surface (coating break). Field measurements include different conditions, such as temperature, soil resistivity and soil physical structure and chemical composition.

In consideration of the satisfied application in the field of the methodology, it is believed that it can be used for the monitoring of damages in pipes in areas with high consequences and hence pipe integrity can be increased.

This real-time methodology is based on the impedance distribution signal and the differential changes along the pipeline under operating conditions. The results showed good agreement with the proposed methodology, which is able to discriminate some situations inherent of field conditions by using different impedance measurements performed along ±10 km of buried steel pipeline and assuming the reference location as the cathodic protection set up.