Optimisation of Wastewater Volume of Single Chamber Biological Cathodic Protection System

Abstract

In this study, the concept of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) was applied in the biological cathodic protection (CP) system in order to protect steel pipe. There are various factors affect the performance of the system including the volume of the medium.The purposes of this study were to analyse and optimise the effect of volume ratio of wastewater to the sand on biological CP performance by using Taguchi method. The maximum performance of biological CP in this study was obtained at the largest volume ratio. The orthogonal array and the signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) were employed to study the effect of volume ratio on performance of biological CP. The CP potential vs. copper sulfate electrode (CSE) was -835 mV. It shows that the corrosion of carbon steel pipe was reduced since the native potential of the carbon steel pipe vs. CSE was -531 mV.