Investigation on service life prediction models of reinforced concrete structures exposed to chloride laden environment

Abstract

The performance-based design of reinforced concrete structures, which focuses on the compliance with durability limit state and service life design of reinforced concrete structures, has received much interest nowadays. Concrete reinforcement corrosion has been identified to be a primary source of lack of resilience and long-term disintegration in the structure. Chloride ingress and carbonation has been identified as the root cause of corrosion of steel embedded in concrete. The development of models for predicting the service life of concrete has been ongoing for many years. This project work reviews service life prediction, and modelling of reinforced concrete structures subjected to chloride ingress. A comparative study of the four existing models is done, identifying the advantages and limitations of them followed by computer simulation of these models using MATLAB. The models considering free chloride concentration as the driving force and those considering the effect of chloride binding on diffusion coefficient, predicts higher service life while the models based on total chloride concentration give conservative results.