Some Open Issues in Forecasting Corrosion Risk of Steel in Concrete

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Useful corrosion damage forecast and risk evaluation methods for steel in concrete were developed starting about three decades ago and are now being used by increasing numbers of engineers. Much room for improvement remains, however, and the following non-exhaustive selection of issues merit special attention in the next generation of predictive models: incorporation of chloride binding in predicting chloride ion penetration to avoid overly conservative design, resolution by additional mechanistic understanding, and a wider database of uncertainty in the long-term evolution of chloride diffusivity in aged concrete, consideration of geometric chloride transport obstructions at the rebar level, and integration of initiation and propagation stage modeling, in particular accounting for the dependence of the chloride threshold on steel potential. Each feature is discussed with attention to the conservative or non-conservative result of its eventual incorporation, and with indication of practical means for its ...