Natural Gas Station Conductive Polymer Flexible Anode

Conductive plastic cable anodes, commonly known as flexible anodes in China, are a new type of auxiliary anode developed and applied in recent years. They are made by coating conductive plastic over a copper core. Conductive plastic is a modified plastic embedded with conductive materials to ensure stable conductivity. The role of the flexible anode in conducting current is fulfilled by the built-in copper core. Because it resembles a cable, it is also referred to as a cable anode, i.e., a flexible anode. The anode is flexible, possesses sufficient mechanical strength, and exhibits good chemical stability. Flexible anodes are primarily used for the cathodic protection of buried pipelines and tank bottoms. They were originally developed to address the issue of severely aged anti-corrosion coatings on old buried pipelines, which leads to a significant increase in cathodic protection current, making it difficult for traditional cathodic protection technologies to meet the protection requirements. Generally, completely replacing pipelines is very costly. Practice has proven that the application of flexible anodes successfully resolves the cathodic protection challenges of old pipelines. It addresses issues such as interference with external structures by traditional cathodic protection technologies, cathodic protection in high-resistance environments, and the distribution of cathodic protection current on tank bottoms. Like other auxiliary anode applications, flexible anodes should also be filled with coke powder to ensure low grounding resistance of the anode bed. The installation of flexible anodes is similar to cable laying. First, an anode trench is excavated parallel to the pipeline, and half of the coke powder is placed in the trench to position the flexible anode. The other half is then covered with coke powder, followed by backfilling with the original soil, and finally, a large amount of backfill is applied.