Experimental Assessment of Rebar Corrosion in Concrete Slab Using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)

Ahmad Zaki,Wan Muhd Aminuddin Wan Hussin,Yessi Jusman,Megat Azmi Megat Johari

doi:10.1155/2018/5389829

Abstract

Corrosion of steel reinforcement is a major cause of structural damage that requires repair or replacement. Early detection of steel corrosion can limit the extent of necessary repairs or replacements and costs associated with the rehabilitation works. The ground penetrating radar (GPR) method has been found to be a useful method for evaluating reinforcement corrosion in existing concrete structures. In this paper, GPR was utilized to assess corrosion of steel reinforcement in a concrete slab. A technique for accelerating reinforcement bar corrosion using direct current (DC) power supply with 5% sodium chloride (NaCl) solution was used to induce corrosion to embedded reinforcement bars (rebars) in this concrete slab. A 2 GHz GPR was used to assess the corrosion of the rebars. The analysis of the results of the GPR data obtained shows that corrosion of the rebars could be effectively localized and assessed.

Highlights

Corrosion of steel reinforcement is a worldwide problem of concrete structures [1]
It has been demonstrated that the presence of rebar corrosion in a concrete slab has been successfully assessed using ground penetrating radar (GPR)
The processes start with concrete slab fabrication followed by the results of imposed current technique and data collection by scanning a reinforced concrete slab using 2 GHz of the GPR

Summary

Introduction

Corrosion of steel reinforcement is a worldwide problem of concrete structures [1]. Many reports have highlighted that all over the world concrete structures are damaged by corrosion and the costs associated with repair and maintenance required worldwide have exceeded billions of dollars [3]. The half-cell potential (HCP) technique is the most widely used nondestructive test to detect and localize rebar corrosion. The half-cell potential technique is based on electrochemical principles which provides information pertaining to the probability of reinforcement corrosion in concrete structures [2, 4]. GPR is capable of early detection of reinforcement corrosion in concrete structures [6,7,8,9,10,11]. Based on the capability of the GPR method to investigate corrosion, this paper proposes an assessment of rebar corrosion using GPR on a concrete slab with embedded corroded steel bars

Methods

Results

Conclusion