Influence of Cracks on the Durability of RC Structures

Abstract

To carry out maintenance and assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) structures, a good understanding of the effect of the change in bond behaviour of reinforcement during service life is essential. Steel reinforcement is subjected to corrosion due to carbonation and chloride attack. The former ordinarily induces uniform corrosion, the latter induces generally localised corrosion at cracks level. The existence of cracks and the crack width affect the starting points of corrosion, as indicated by the results of the exposure test carried out by Shiessl et al.[1]. Corresponding techniques, such as non-destructive in-situ testing for concrete cover thickness, permeability and the positions of the reinforcing bars, are helpful to model the real behaviour. Cracked portion around the tensile reinforcement in a flexural member can be considered to be equivalent to a concrete member having a single reinforcement subjected to pull-out force at both ends. In this paper a damage process model is proposed based on slip crack propagation in order to evaluate the effective load capacity.