Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

BODE PLOT OR BACKHOE, STABLE

RECTIFICATION ON WELL COATED PIPES.
Author: Richard A Brodribb1, M. Brodribb Pty Ltd

SUMMARY: The coatings on modern pipelines for the oil and gas industry combine durability
with high resistivity to provide environmental and electrical protection against corrosion.
Impressed current cathodic protection (ICCP) from a transformer rectifier may be used to
provide additional corrosion protection. The high resistance of the pipeline coating when first
installed may require little protection current but the current requirement after many years in
service can be significantly greater. The requirement for the rectifier control system to
operate in a stable manner over a very wide dynamic range creates design problems
because the pipeline may require very little current when first installed.

This paper discusses the reason that rectifier instability can occur in such situations and
methods that can be used to mitigate or eliminate rectifier instability.

Keywords: ICCP, rectifier, stability, coatings, pipeline, automatic control.

1. INTRODUCTION
Modern gas and water pipelines are often provided with mill applied outside coatings made from plastics or
epoxies which have good insulating properties. (1) The DC electrical resistance of a pipe applied with these
coatings in good condition to ground, can be many millions of ohms even for long lengths of pipe (2). The output
current the rectifier delivers is determined by Ohms Law I = V/R, where I is current, V is rectifier voltage and R is
the total circuit resistance. If R is high then I will be correspondingly low.

The pipe also has AC electrical characteristics of capacitance, which depends on the insulation thickness and
inductance, which depends on the pipe length and diameter. In addition, the longer the pipe the more it is
susceptible to external electrical and magnetic fields such as induced voltages from powerlines and induced
currents from telluric or soil currents. In essence, the pipe is also a long antenna whose sensitivity to picking up
these external signals is increased as the pipe has higher resistance to ground.

This combination of low current demand and susceptibility to external electrical influences can lead to cases like
the following.

Case 1. A 30V 10A rectifier is commissioned on a newly finished pipeline. The operating voltage for full
protection is a fluctuating 3V and close to zero current, which does not display on the analog ammeter
used. The operators are unsure if the rectifier is operating at all.

Case 2. A 20V 5A cathodic protection system is installed on a long pipeline running north south in an
iron ore rich area. The output voltage sometimes rises slowly to about 12V and the rectifier current
subsides to zero then the voltage falls to a few volts and the current rapidly increases to a few amps. Is
the rectifier functioning correctly?

Case 3. A series of 20V 10A rectifiers are installed on a new pipe network that has temporary zinc mesh
earthing. The output voltage is a low value and the rectifiers do not delivery any current. The pipeline
remains protected. The customer questions the need for the expenditure on impressed current
cathodic protection rectifier systems.

This paper will discuss how these observations relate to the problem of rectifier stability and suggest mitigation
strategies.

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 1

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

2. FEEDBACK CONTROL
Rectifiers installed on pipe systems usually have some form of automatic control to hold the output constant
against some given value without manual intervention.

Common modes of operation of rectifiers used on pipelines are constant voltage, where the rectifier output
voltage remains constant for varying current, constant current, where the output current remains constant
although the voltage can vary and constant potential, where the voltage from an external reference is held
constant and both the voltage and current vary.

To hold the output of any system constant the output is checked, or sampled, and compared to the desired
value. Any difference between the desired value and the sample of the output value becomes an error signal.
The error signal is fed into the device which provides the output, in our case ,the rectifier, and the output moves
up or down to make it closer to the desired output set by the control signal.

This control process is called negative feedback and can be shown in a simple system as below

Figure 1 - Closed loop feedback (after (3))

The rectifier may not respond instantly to the change in control and if the response is delayed the situation could
arise where the rectifier is always trying to respond to an output which has already changed. The output might
then oscillate or ‘hunt’.

This could be imagined as a driver trying to reach a constant speed while driving a car that is very slow to
respond to the accelerator being depressed or released. The driver reaches the speed they desire and
releases the accelerator but the car continues to accelerate. Releasing the pedal doesn’t slow the car until later
and it loses speed to below the desired level, never achieving the desired speed.

This delay between input and output is called, in control theory, phase shift.

The rectifier may also respond to the change in control by increasing or decreasing the output by a large
amount for a small change in control signal. This might be analogous to our driver now driving a powerful sports
car where a small touch of the accelerator instantly increased the car speed to above the desired level.
Releasing the pedal instantly engages a brake and the speed drops. Again, the driver can’t achieve the desired
speed.

This change of output to input is called gain.

It is possible to see if a system will be stable, that is, if the driver will be able to settle on the desired speed, by
examining the values of gain and phase shift versus frequency using the technique called “Bode” plotting.

Frequency can be imagined as how fast you can depress and release the accelerator or how fast you can
increase and decrease the control potentiometer of the rectifier.

A Bode plot shows the gain of the forward system, be it rectifier or car, versus frequency and the phase shift of
the forward system versus frequency.

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 2

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

Examining the gain and phase shift can show if the system will be stable by calculation of a value called gain
margin

Gain Margin. The gain in dB must be less than zero dB (less than a gain of 1 ) when the phase shift is 180
degrees. This can be understood being that the feedback signal when the phase shift is 180 degrees – acting
to amplify the output, not reduce it, must occur when the gain is less than 1 or the system will oscillate

Figure 2 (from (4))

For a fixed phase shift the higher the gain, the closer to instability the control system will be and will become
unstable if the gain is above zero db at 180 degrees phase shift. (5)

3. RECTIFIERS WITHOUT AND WITH FEEDBACK CONTROL

The use of transformer rectifiers for cathodic protection dates back to the 1920’s in Australia (6)). Early designs
of cathodic protection rectifier comprised a step down transformer and selenium diodes with voltage adjustment
carried out by changing transformer taps.

Manual control, no feedback.

Manually controlled rectifiers, although with silicon rectifiers rather than selenium types, is still in wide use today.
This rectifier has no internal feedback adjustment – a technician manually adjusts the output to achieve or
maintain protection.

While simple in construction and reliable in operation, the drawback to this type of rectifier is that the output will
not compensate for any changes in environmental conditions such as the circuit loop resistance. The output
from the rectifier is approximately constant voltage and the current varies in proportion to the loop resistance.

A rectifier like this cannot oscillate or ‘hunt’ as there is no feedback.

Feedback controlled rectifiers

Our company had been manufacturing manual control rectifiers for many years and received its first requests for
cathodic protection rectifiers with adjustable current or adjustable potential control in the late 1970’s. By the
early 1990’s the majority of the cathodic protection rectifiers we were manufacturing used closed loop feedback
control for constant voltage, constant current and often, constant potential control. This trend has continued to
the present time.

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 3

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

Rectifiers with closed loop feedback control can be adjusted over a wide operating range in voltage, current or
potential modes and have advantages in setting maximum output current and voltage to protect anodes and to
reduce the chance of overprotection of the protected structure. (7)

A block diagram for a thyristor controlled rectifier with feedback, commonly used for cathodic protection is
shown below in figure 3.

Figure 3 Thyristor controlled cathodic protection rectifier with feedback

The rectifier control system comprises

a. A control input – here it is a potentiometer R1

b. A feedback summation amplifier – which adds the positive control and negative feedback signals
together to provide a error signal.
c. A transformer, rectifier and filter section. In this section the error signal is used to control the rectifier
output by changing the amount of transformed AC voltage that is rectified into DC. The filter section
reduces the amount of AC voltage component which is superimposed on the DC voltage.
d. A feedback signal which monitors the output and provides signal to the feedback summation amplifier.
e. The Cathodic protection load (CP Load)

4. FACTORS AFFECTING RECTIFIER STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE.

Understanding from the Bode plot that increased gain leads to reduced stability provides a way of examining
why a rectifier with closed loop control might be unstable .

Characteristics of the rectifier circuit.

The rectifier circuit shown in figure 3 does not have a linear relationship between input error signal and output
voltage.
For voltages that are a small fraction of the maximum possible rectifier voltage a small change in error signal
produces a large change in output, that is, the gain is higher and this effect is more pronounced the lighter the
load.
For output voltages that are a higher fraction of the maximum rectifier voltage the same change in error signal
produces a lesser change in output so at that higher fraction of voltage the gain is less . (8)
The significance of this to the well coated pipeline case is that if only a low output voltage in comparison with
rated voltage, combined with minimal current, is required for protection, e.g. 3V rather than 30V, then the gain
will be higher and the stability of the system reduced.

Requirement for high regulator performance.

Gain is the ratio of the error signal to the rectifier output in the case we are considering. It can be shown that
the higher the gain, the less is the difference between the control signal and the feedback signal and so the

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 4

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

closer the output is to the desired set point. (9) A requirement to provide a tightly regulated output over a wide
range will require higher gain and the stability of the system may be reduced.

These were the contributory causes to the effects noted in Case 1.

External sources in the feedback loop.

The circuit of figure 3 shows direct feedback of the voltage from the cathodically protected pipe to the rectifier
control circuit. However external sources can also affect the voltage on the pipe, independently of the rectifier
and the feedback circuit also attempts to compensate for them as well. Typical external sources include AC
interference induced from overhead cabling and from telluric or ground currents introducing an additional
voltage of varying value and polarity on the pipe.

Figure 4 Thyristor controlled cathodic protection rectifier with feedback and external source

Figure 4 shows an external source connected to the pipeline in parallel with the rectifier. When the external
source, a telluric in this case. causes the pipeline voltage to drop the rectifier will compensate by delivering
current to the CP load. When the external source causes the voltage to rise above the desired setpoint the
rectifier, which is unable to prevent that voltage rise, will not deliver any current.

This was the contributory cause to the effect noted in Case 2.

Control value is exceeded.

We have so far discussed feedback from the rectifier as being a sample of output voltage. In practice, voltage,
current and auto-potenial from a reference can all be feedback variables. The feedback signal is just derived
from a different source which could be a current shunt or a reference cell. The feedback circuit operates by
comparing that value against the control signal and the error signal drives the rectifier output to hold the
measured value constant with respect to the control.

In the case of auto-potential control, a voltage is derived from a half cell connected to the pipe. If the half-cell
measured value exceeds the value of the setpoint i.e is more protected, there is no action the rectifier can take
to pull the pipe back to a less protected state. The closest action the feedback circuit can undertake is to switch
off the output.

This was the contributory cause to the effect noted in Case 3.

In all the above cases, the specific electrical characteristics of a well-coated pipe, combined with the
consequential requirements for minimal protective current, when used with a feedback controlled rectifier, led to
the issues described of instability or unexpected behavior.

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 5

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

5. IMPROVING RECTIFIER STABILTY AND PERFORMANCE

Bode analysis shows that operating a thyristor controlled rectifier with light load and reduced output voltage can
lead to instability. Practical solutions have been developed to address these problems and to obtain stable
operation and some of these will be discussed.

Increase the rectifier load

The rectifier gain will fall when the output is more heavily loaded. One commonly applied solution is to provide
additional resistive loads inside the rectifier in parallel with the output circuit. The typical resistor values may
be about 5% of the rated current.
At reduced output the heat dissipation of such resistors is small, but if the rectifier ever operates at full voltage
the additional losses in the rectifier cabinet may have to be considered.

Reduce the rectifier maximum voltage

The dependency of gain on the fraction of output to maximum output was discussed in section 4.1
A solution to this is to provide taps on the secondary of the rectifier transformer so that the rectifier output is a
larger percentage of the maximum output at that tap. In that way the gain is reduced and the rectifier more likely
to be stable.

Voltage taps at 25%, 50% and 75% of rated transformer output are sometimes specified for this purpose. A
reduced maximum output voltage has several advantages as well as reducing the gain, which include reduced
AC ripple, lower AC input current and lower transformer losses. However, this strategy also reduces the
maximum voltage of the rectifier and it may be necessary to monitor rectifier performance to ensure that the
rectifier can deliver sufficient voltage to provide protective current in the worst case of high circuit loop
resistance

Change the phase response of the feedback system.

It is possible to change the phase response of the complete system by adding elements of lead or lag to the
feedback network. The analysis of the stability of a feedback system with these elements is beyond the scope of
this paper, but one solution is to add additional time delay elements (lagging elements) in the feedback network
so that the response of the system is so slowed that it gradually reaches the setpoint and settles at it. Delays
in response of the rectifier to changes may be in some seconds but corrosion is a slow process and a slow
response will not affect the effectiveness of the system in many cases, especially if there are few external
sources of interference.

Australian Standards for cathodic protection do not specify a required rate of response for the rectifier (10).

Adaptive and non linear control strategies.

We have considered so far only analog control systems that sample a feedback value and continuously provide
an error signal to the controller. Some more complex control strategies used in other rectifier applications
outside cathodic protection might also be considered to address the problem of the wide range required for the
well coated pipe.

These could include:

a. Feedback elements which provide an inverse gain function onto the non linear gain of the rectifier so that
the whole gain function is corrected to being linear
b. Combined feedforward and feedback control which ‘knows’ what value of control output is required for a
given feedback result and blends this with measured feedback. Such systems are sometimes called
“fuzzy logic” systems

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 6

Print Back to List of Papers Zoom In Zoom Out Previous Page Next Page CLOSE PAPER

6. CONCLUSION
Transformer rectifiers for well coated pipelines have to be able to operate in a stable way when the pipeline
coating is in good condition and little current is required. The same rectifier must also be able to provide
sufficient protective current to the pipeline when the coating has degraded.

This paper discusses causes for unstable rectifier operation based on the control theory technique of Bode
analysis and suggests ways of improving stability by additional loading, e.g. the backhoe approach, and by
other strategies that can reduce gain or increase stability.

Well coated metallic pipelines are likely to be in use for many years and the requirement for pipelines to be
cathodically protected will accompany them. Stable operation of the rectifier will be necessary to provide
consistent, effective cathodic protection and to reassure the operators and asset owners that the rectifier is
operating in a predictable and well- mannered way.

7. REFERENCES
1. The Evolution of Pipeline Coatings [Gas Exploration]KTA University. Senkowski E. B
https://ktauniversity.com/evolution-pipeline-coatings/
2. Cathodic Protection issues with Ultra Well coated Pipelines. Martin B and Brodribb R. Presented ACA
National Conference 2007.
3. Feedback and Control systems, page 112. Distefano J, Stubberud, A, Williams I, McGraw Hill New
York, NY. 1967.
4. “Introduction to Operational Amplifiers – Microchip 2018
http://microchipdeveloper.com/asp0107:phase-gain-margins
5. Reference data for Radio Engineers, 4th Edition IT and T, Chapter 14. New York, NY 1949.
6. VEC Resource Manual DOC /14/11619, Energy safe Victoria 2014
7. Cathodic Protection Design Recommended Practice DNV-RP-B401, section 5.5. Det Norske Veritas
2011
8. “The design of a simple single phase Silicon Controlled Rectifier Regulator” McVey E, Russell, R, IEEE
International Convention Record, Part 8, March 1966
9. Feedback and Control systems, Pg 164, op.cit
10. AS 2832.1 – 2015. Cathodic Protection of Metals – Pipes and Cables.

Corrosion & Prevention 2018 Paper 25 - Page 7