Abstract
Corrosion presence is a recurrent concern in buildings and structures that use steel as their core or as reinforcement, due to the change of steel's properties caused by this phenomena. Therefore, methods to detect and quantify corrosion had been developed; some are based on electrical and electrochemical measurements. On reinforced concrete structures, sometimes there are exposed steel bars which are visible, but on those, a visual inspection could determine corrosion presence. There exist different options to measure the steel bars' corrosion and its level. The more straight forward consists of cutting through the concrete until the bar is exposed and connecting a measurement device there. A disadvantage of this technique is that steel has to be exposed to the environment during the measurement; as an alternative, novel contact-less electrochemical techniques are getting more popular. Recent advances in low-cost and portable electrochemical devices and embedded sensors can change how the structures are tested. Moreover, there is a discussion about how those devices, if developed for other fields as biosensors, can assist in other areas. This mini-review also gives some hints of what the future trends could be due to the combination of those areas.
Highlights
From long ago, humans had been building bridges to connect cities, countries, and overcome obstacles; the materials used in these constructions have changed over the times, from the stone and wood to the modern bridges made of steel and concrete
The changes in temperature can cause small dilatations and contractions; the rainfalls could raise the humidity. These factors increase the probability that corrosion appears on the steel bars used during the construction
Some researchers had developed models to predict corrosion (Tuutti, 1982; Guo et al, 2019) that are used to estimate the aging of a structure and the corrosion in advance
Summary
Humans had been building bridges to connect cities, countries, and overcome obstacles; the materials used in these constructions have changed over the times, from the stone and wood to the modern bridges made of steel and concrete. These studies lead to models that can characterize how the transport changes depending on the wetting/drying cycles (van der Zanden et al, 2015; Kušter Maricet al., 2020) In this mini-review, standard corrosion detection methods are presented, including commercial devices used; the third section shows recent developments in terms of low-cost and portable devices that meet similar criteria, embedded sensors, and a benchmark. This technique requires a direct connection to the steel, which in some cases, implies digging across the concrete to expose the steel To avoid this situation, researchers had explored the use of electrochemical analysis (Keddam et al, 2009; Alexander and Orazem, 2020b), with contact-less measurements, which could calculate steel corrosion using Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). Miniaturized Potentiostat (Segura and Osma, 2017) Wireless potentiostat (Steinberg et al, 2015) USB Potentiostat Galvanostat (Dobbelaere, 2017) USB based sensor (Bukkawar et al, 2019) Autolab PGSTAT101
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