Reinforced concrete is a widely used material for structures of different types as bridges, buildings, underground structures and others. Damage due to reinforcement corrosion is recognized as one of the major causes of deterioration of such structures with service life…
Reinforced concrete is a widely used material for structures of different types as bridges, buildings, underground structures and others. Damage due to reinforcement corrosion is recognized as one of the major causes of deterioration of such structures with service life reduction and considerable additional costs as consequence. An extensive amount of research on these topics has been organized and reported over the last decades and it has been published elsewhere and also reflected in recent international standards and documents – e.g. fib Draft Model Code [1]. The present paper concentrates on the propagation period, i.e. reinforcement corrosion effects, relevant limit states, modelling of degradation mechanism, software tool and service life issue. Several analytical models are briefly presented. The described approach is applied to some illustrative examples showing the feasibility to capture the development of reinforcement corrosion and consequently its effect on the service life and/or reliability of the structure.