Influence of chloride ions and hot weather on isolated rusting steel bar in concrete based on NDT and electro-chemical model evaluation

Abstract

The most prominent durability concern for reinforced concrete (RC) structures is the corrosion of steel reinforcement in concrete. RC buildings exposed to chloride and high temperature environments like sea and deserts suffer from accelerated corrosion of rebars. The chloride attack and increase in the electro-chemical reaction rate of corrosion due to high temperature is a thermodynamic phenomenon influenced by several parameters and some of them are being neglected in the past research works. The purpose of this present paper is therefore, to model and verify by NDT the coupled effects of chloride and temperature on corrosion of reinforcement throughout the life of concrete buildings by incorporating realistic thermodynamic model evaluations and actual field condition NDT. The model evaluation has been accomplished by the use of concrete durability model as a computational platform on which the corrosion based reinforced concrete building performance and quality at early age and throughout the life of concrete structure is examined in both space and time domains under environmental actions of chloride and temperature. On this line, the thermodynamic modeling evaluation of concrete forms the fundamental core of the theoretical approach to achieve both the scientific knowledge and engineering simulations of altering materials. The NDT results for the effect of chloride and temperature on corrosion have been compared with the DuCOM electro-chemical thermodynamic corrosion model evaluation and are found to be in close agreement with each other.