Long-term extrapolation of chloride ingress: An illustration of the feasibility and pitfalls of the square root law

Abstract

Clinker substitution is limited by the availability of suitable supplementary cementitious materials. Therefore, flexible methods must be adopted by practitioners to assess lab performance that can be extrapolated to long-term field conditions. In this study, we assess the square root law for chloride ingress in cementitious materials using a single-species reactive transport model and new analysis of published experiments. Our results illustrate the suitability of the square root law as a first approximation extrapolation tool. As the square root law is defined by a diffusion-controlled process, this analysis opens the door to even quicker methods which are related to the effective diffusion coefficient.