ABSTRACT
There are well established standards and models for durable design of new reinforced concrete structures (BSI 8500-1 2006, Bamforth 2004, CONTECVET 2001). These allow design engineers to evaluate the relative cost effectiveness of different corrosion mitigation options along with the optimum concrete mix design and cover for different exposure conditions. As they have been designed to be very conservative and to design structures of typically 50 or 100 year life, none of them have been fully field tested. Typically they are based on fairly long term data (more than a decade) of large samples at exposure sites. National and international construction codes are more prescriptive. For example the new Eurocode for design BSI 8500-1 (2006) has tables of reinforcement cover, cement types and water/binder ratios to achieve design lives of 25, 50 or 100 years in environments ranging from indoors and mild inland to extreme marine exposure conditions. NACE SP 0187 (2008) also gives an overview of these types of approaches.
