COMPUTER TECHNIQUES FOR OFFSHORE CORROSION PROTECTION.

Lockheed Marine Services (LMS) has been providing Cathodic Protection (CP) hardware and engineering services to the marine industry for 20 years. LMS has developed a sophisticated design program which eliminates reliance on sometimes dangerous assumptions and conservative ″rules-of-thumb.″ The Computerized Current Density (CCD) program represents a significant advancement in the current state-of-the-art of corrosion protection. It offers offshore operators an alternative to outmoded design techniques and puts cathodic protection on an equal technical level with other areas of the rapidly advancing offshore oil industry technology. The computer design method provides some notable benefits to offshore operators over conventional techniques. For example, the program will predict the level of protection that will be achieved on every member of a complex structure for a given design. Thus, the design is verified or modified before the CP system is installed. Another advantage is the ability to vary critical parameters and observe the effects. In this way the design can be based on ″worse case″ conditions if test data are limited.