Monitoring and control of terrestrial pipe cathode protection system based on wireless sensor network

Cathode protection is often used to slow down the corrosion of terrestrial pipe. This paper aims to design and develop a system to monitor the terrestrial pipe cathode protection equipments, which can not only collect the potential information in time, but also fine-tune the guard mode of cathode protection on demand. This system integrates technology of wireless sensor networks and GPRS to collect potential data and realize remote data transmission. Mechanisms are adopted to effectively lower the energy assumption and to ensure reliability, such as work-on-duty, allowing for power saving in selection of hardware components, and using TDMA protocol to avoid collision. Trial running of the system has published good results with 96% or higher success ratio of data transmission and low power saving. In all, this system can meet the requirements of timely detecting physical exception of terrestrial pipeline and controlling wireless sensor networks on demand.