Enhanced electro-chemical corrosion model for reinforced concrete under severe coupled action of chloride and temperature

The premature deterioration of reinforced concrete construction and building materials has become a major concern throughout the world. Reinforced concrete buildings exposed to aggressive environments such as severe chloride attack coupled with high temperature suffer from accelerated corrosion of reinforcement material. The effect of chloride and temperature on corrosion is an electro-chemical thermodynamic phenomenon influenced by several parameters and some of them have been overlooked in the past research works and are controversially discussed. The purpose of this paper is therefore; to model and verify the corrosion potential and corrosion rate of reinforcement throughout the life of concrete buildings by incorporating realistic electro-chemical thermodynamic models and environment controlled laboratory experimentation. This research presents a simplified semi-empirical corrosion material modeling approach which obeys the basic corrosion science laws and is also verified by experimentation involving a wide range of chloride and temperature variations. The material modeling task has been conducted by the use of concrete construction durability model ‘DuCOM’ developed by our research group as a computational platform on which the coupled temperature-chloride induced corrosion throughout the life of reinforced concrete buildings is examined in both space and time domains.