Corrosion Characteristics of Reinforced Concrete Under the Coupled Effects of Chloride Ingress and Static Loading: Laboratory Tests and Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the coupled effects of chloride ingress and static loading on the evolution of corrosion of steel reinforcement in concrete. A new corrosion test was adopted to accelerate the non-uniform corrosion of the steel. Finite element analysis was used to investigate the influence of coupled chemo-mechanical processes on corrosion expansion stress of the concrete cover. As is shown by the results, the half-cell potentials of steel reinforcement in the reinforced concrete specimens decreased with increase in the number of wetting-drying cycles and the applied static loading, which cause the steel reinforcement to be more prone to corrosion attack. Owing to the coupled action of chloride ingress and static loading, non-uniform distribution of corrosion activity on the steel reinforcement increased significantly. The finite element simulations showed the existence of static loading increased the maximum stress on the concrete cover, which increases the susceptibility of concrete cover to corrosion-related expansion cracking.

Damage Evolution of RC Beams Under Simultaneous Reinforcement Corrosion and Sustained Load

“…The mesh was produced using the built-in sweep technique, in which mesh is first generated on the left-hand side of the model and extruded along the beam to mesh the whole beam, as shown in Figure 9 b. The mesh is created using hexahedral elements C3D8R [ 29 ].…”

“…However, there are limited studies focusing on the damage evaluation of the RC beams under combined reinforcement corrosion and sustained loads, particularly for numerical simulation of corroded RC beams. The authors of this study proposed a finite element model for the RC beams under coupled reinforcement corrosion and sustained load in which the elasto-plasticity model was adopted for concrete [ 29 ]. Thus, the damage evolution of corroded RC beams cannot be simulated.…”

An Assessment of the Structural Performance of Rebar-Corroded Reinforced Concrete Beam Members

“…Typically, corrosion is caused by an incorporation into the concrete mixture [12], the attack of chloride ions penetrating via diffusion from the outside [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], the carbonation of the concrete cover [17,18,20], or a combination of these issues [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. As corrosion progresses, the expansive displacement at the interface generated by accumulating rust products causes tensile stress in the hoop direction within the concrete cover [30], leading to radial splitting cracks in the cover concrete [11,16,22,28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…However, in real structures, not every part of the structure deteriorates even though it is of the same member and under the same condition [15,50,[66][67][68][69]. Similarly, sections of the members and reinforcing bars corrode unevenly [51,70].…”