The paper will be presented in the section "Marine Corrosion and Transport Symposium – STG 44" and is a joined paper of Elsyca and Corrosion & Water-Control, Herenweg 58A, P.O. Box 47, 2750 AA Moerkapelle, The Netherlands.

Design considerations for cathodic protection systems of seawater applications have been changing in the past 20 years, because ICCP systems have made a big development in the last decades. Nowadays ICCP systems offers 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 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, in casu the Moss Krylov Octabuoy. 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 clearly demonstrated that the computer simulation results provide a pefect indication on how to improve the ICCP system design.