ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, service-life modelling of concrete structures has become feasible and, subsequently, increasingly popular. Today many owners require service lives of 100 or even 200 years for important concrete infrastructure. Acknowledging previous work on modelling since the 1970s (Siemes et al., 1985), a major breakthrough was due to European Research project DuraCrete (DuraCrete, 2000; Siemes et al., 2000). DuraCrete successfully combined mathematical modelling of degradation processes with structural design philosophy, in particular reliability analysis. Since then, similar approaches and extensions have been worked out, additional field work has been done and particular subjects have been refined (Polder and Rooij, 2005; Gehlen, 2000; Li et al., 2008; FIB, 2006). Over the last five years, a simplified version has been developed in the Netherlands for chlorideinduced corrosion (CUR, 2009). In principle, the approach is aimed at service-life design of new structures. However, modelling the remaining life of existing structures could be just as important for maintaining our infrastructure. Some work on degradation modelling was extended in that sense (Polder and Rooij, 2005; Rooij and Polder, 2005) but the subject is definitely underdeveloped. The main body of this chapter is devoted to describing the simplified model for chloride-induced corrosion related service-life design. However, in the final sections, possible application to existing structures is discussed.
