Numerical optimization of an impressed current cathodic protection system for reinforced concrete structures

• Numerical optimization method of ICCP system for RC structures has been presented.
• Accurate design parameters for ICCP system are obtained by numerical optimization.
• The optimized ICCP scheme can control the corrosion of RC structure well.
• The total cost of the optimized ICCP system has a significant drop.

Impressed current cathodic protection (ICCP) has been verified to be an effective method to control the corrosion of reinforced concrete (RC) structures, and the use of numerical simulation methods has become a powerful technique to investigate ICCP systems. This paper presents a numerical optimization method to design an economical and effective ICCP system for RC structures. First, the numerical model of the ICCP electrical field is built. The potential of the reinforcing steel and service life of the ICCP system are constrained by the protection potential in BS 12696:2012 and the life expectancy of the RC structure to be protected, and the accurate design parameters of the ICCP system, for example, the location and area of the anode overlay and the amplitude of the output voltage, are obtained by minimizing the total cost of the ICCP system. Finally, a small-scale RC T-shaped beam is adopted as an example to illustrate the numerical optimization method, and corresponding prototypes are developed to verify the corrosion control effect of the numerically optimized ICCP system.