Advancing corrosion monitoring in concrete structures through digital representation

Abstract

Corrosion in reinforced concrete structures is one of the main issues for the durability of these structures. Advanced corrosion monitoring can reduce the related costs of maintenance and repair actions of concrete structures by timely measures in early deterioration phases. This primarily requires the digitalization and integration of corrosion monitoring into the administrative processes of infrastructure operators. The anticipated methods of infrastructure operators must also be considered. This article presents a visionary approach to the further development and digitalization of corrosion monitoring. The digital representation of corrosion monitoring has valuable advantages for structures with a long service life. Especially, the combination of positional and alphanumerical information in a consistent system is beneficial for administrations that face the change of responsible persons over time. The information loss can be reduced with the use of building information modeling (BIM). The first step is to define and identify the necessary BIM model parameters, which have been carried out for the main components of the corrosion monitoring system. Therefore, the challenges in the digital representation of corrosion monitoring systems must be solved. One challenge is the integration of corrosion sensors into the structure and thereby the overlap of different objects in the same place. Additionally, the sensors are not visible after the installation whether in the physical or the digital. BIM use cases of sensor representation and data visualization are shown as examples to overcome these challenges. The data visualization offers the responsible person a quick overview and the possibility to start further analysis.