ACA/BEM for solving large-scale cathodic protection problems

Cathodic Protection of A Container Ship Using A Detailed BEM Model

“…2020, 8, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 14 solved by discretizing only the under protection metallic surface. In the last few decades, BEM has been extensively used to solve sacrificial CP and ICCP problems mainly in ships [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], offshore and subsea structures [19,20], buried pipelines, underground structures, and steel-reinforced concrete [21], as well as optimization problems regarding the optimum placement of the anodes [8]. However, despite its advantages, the application of conventional BEM to large-scale problems suffers from very time-consuming computations and high demands for computer memory capacity.…”

“…A well-established and powerful numerical tool for analyzing cathodic protection problems is the boundary element method (BEM) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. One remarkable advantage it offers is the reduction of the dimensionality of the problem by one.…”

“…Thus, although the electrochemical process occurs at the metallic surface and the surrounding electrolyte volume, cathodic protection (CP) problems can be solved by discretizing only the under protection metallic surface. In the last few decades, BEM has been extensively used to solve sacrificial CP and ICCP problems mainly in ships [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], offshore and subsea structures [19,20], buried pipelines, underground structures, and steel-reinforced concrete [21], as well as optimization problems regarding the optimum placement of the anodes [8].…”

“…On the other hand, the design of an efficient ICCP system demands accurate modelling of the exact geometry of complex metallic structures. The use of hierarchical matrices (HM) and adaptive cross approximation (ACA) techniques, accelerate the computation of matrix [A] drastically and also reduce the memory requirements [20].…”

“…In this work, an ICCP system of a container ship is designed, with the aid of the ACA/BEM code, proposed in a previous work of the present co-authors [20], utilizing a detailed large-scale model. The problem is modelled, taking into consideration the exact geometry of the ship, the progressive damage of the coating system in various regions and the dynamic conditions during cruise.…”