Unravelling the interplay between steel rebar corrosion rate and corrosion-induced cracking of reinforced concrete
File(s)
Preprint version
OA Location
Author(s)
Korec, E
Jirasek, M
Wong, HS
Martínez-Pañeda, E
Type
preprint
Abstract
Accelerated impressed current testing is the most common experimental method for assessing the susceptibility to corrosion-induced cracking, the most prominent challenge to the durability of reinforced concrete structures. Although it is well known that accelerated impressed current tests lead to slower propagation of cracks (with respect to corrosion penetration) than in natural conditions, which results in overestimations of the delamination/spalling time, the origins of this phenomenon have puzzled researchers for more than a quarter of a century. In view of recent experimental findings, it is postulated that the phenomenon can be attributed to the variability of rust composition and density, specifically to the variable ratio of the mass fractions of iron oxide and iron hydroxideoxide, which is affected by the magnitude of the applied corrosion current density. Based on this hypothesis, a corrosion-induced cracking model for virtual impressed-current testing is presented. The simulation results obtained with the proposed model are validated against experimental data, showing good agreement. Importantly, the model can predict corrosion-induced cracking under natural conditions and thus allows for the calculation of a newly proposed crack width slope correction factor, which extrapolates the surface crack width measured during accelerated impressed current tests to corrosion in natural conditions.
Date Issued
2024-08-27
Citation
arXiv, 2024
Journal / Book Title
arXiv
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2024 The Authors.
Description
Preprint version
Identifier
http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05889v1
Subjects
cs.CE
cs.CE
physics.chem-ph