Cathodic Protection: Potential Attenuation Along a Pipeline

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 ground bed. 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 bed — a textbook leaky-transmission-line problem. This simulator renders a buried pipeline segment in 3D, colors it live by whether each point sits in the NACE-defined protected window, and lets you move the anode bed and dial coating quality, rectifier current, and soil resistivity to see exactly how far a real ICCP system's protection actually extends.