M. Prezzi et al., RELIABILITY APPROACH TO SERVICE LIFE PREDICTION OF CONCRETE EXPOSED TO MARINE ENVIRONMENTS, ACI materials journal, 93(6), 1996, pp. 544-552
Citations number
21
Categorie Soggetti
Construcion & Building Technology","Material Science
During their lifetimes, structures are subjected to external actions o
r agents that in time may alter them from a safe state to failure or a
damaged state. One of the processes that may trigger the onset of cor
rosion of steel embedded in concrete is the ingress of chloride ions t
hat eventually reach the reinforcement, causing the rupture of the pas
sive film. In this paper, a method is proposed for interpretation of i
mmersion test results and prediction of the service life of concrete s
tructures exposed to chloride ions. Once the chloride profiles are det
ermined after the immersion test, a realization of the random diffusio
n coefficient is obtained at each point for which there is a measureme
nt of the chloride content. These samples are used to estimate the pro
bability density function of the diffusion coefficient. A reliability
analysis is subsequently performed for 10 different lightweight high-s
trength concrete mixes. A reinforced concrete element is considered to
have failed when corrosion initiates at the reinforcement, i.e., afte
r a certain chloride concentration threshold is reached at the reinfor
cement. The probability of corrosion initiation in time is calculated
for some of the concrete mixes investigated.