Assessment and Modeling of Qualitative Damage-Induced Chloride Diffusivity on Concrete Durability (original) (raw)

2012, International Congress on Durability of Concrete, Trondheim, Norway

Concrete Durability is associated with many controlling factors such as the quality of concrete used, quality of workmanship, and the operational maintenance. However there are some other factors which are beyond control, including environmental impact such as that imparted by the ingress of chloride into concrete which promote premature deterioration and lessen the useful service life of the structures. Although environmental issues appear to be beyond our control especially for those building and structures adjacent to the shore and in the vicinity of marine environment, yet one can make it hard for the chloride to penetrate reinforce concrete structures by controlling the quality of concrete in terms of proper placement and curing as well as maintaining adequate cover. Prediction of the useful life of a structure depends on the adopted diffusivity used to model the transient problem of chloride migration into the structures. In literatures, however such modeling is based on ideal and non-damaged diffusivity which is rare to be realistic as even under service loading part of the structures are subjected to damage in the tension zone especially for flexural members. It is the purpose of this paper to make comparative assessment of the useful life by considering damaged and undamaged diffusivity. Three cases will be contrasted that of undamaged, uniform damage and linear damage depicting damage in flexural member. A COMSOL package software is used to model the chloride ingress using fink's law with nonlinear diffusivity after incorporating damage. It has been found that the useful life reduced by more than half as compared to the ideal case of using undamaged diffusivity. This calls for different specification of good quality concrete to account for the induced damaged and to prolong the life of the structures as intended.

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