Cathodic Protection: Potential Attenuation Along a Pipeline (2D)

Impressed-current cathodic protection (ICCP) shields a buried steel pipeline from corrosion by driving a small DC current through the soil and into the pipe from a rectifier-fed anode. But that protective current doesn't reach forever: coating defects bleed it into the soil as it travels, so the pipe-to-soil potential decays exponentially with distance from the anode — a textbook leaky-transmission-line problem. This 2D simulator draws a buried pipeline cross-section, plots the live potential-versus-distance curve against the NACE-defined protected window, and lets you drag one or two anodes along the line and dial coating quality and pipe steel resistance to see exactly how far a real ICCP system's protection actually extends — and where a second rectifier is genuinely worth adding.