Some historical notes on the research in corrosion of reinforcement

Abstract

A brief exercise is made on reporting some achievements in the history of reinforcement corrosion. It is a difficult task to try to summarize because there are numerous protagonists in the history then choices were made from a personal point of view. In the decade 1960–1970, reinforcement corrosion was a subject only of marginal interest because the number of built environment was limited. The use of electrochemical techniques was a milestone which enabled from the decade of the 1970 to study the effect of each variable with much more rigor. The studies on service life started in the decade of 1980, although they were not of general interest until next decade. From 1990 Rilem Committees and the Iberoamerican Program on Corrosion of CYTED extended the knowledge so widely that in the XXI century the subject attracts much research interest.