ABSTRACT
Climate change is expected to impact both the operational and structural performance of infrastructure such as buildings, roads and bridges. Decision making in climate change adaptation of core public infrastructure without integrating life cycle assessment (LCA) can potentially create unforeseen problems shifting into the future. However, most past life cycle assessment studies do not consider how the structural and operational performance of infrastructure will be affected by a changing climate. The goal of this research is to understand how a changing climate affects the environmental life cycle performance of several bridge deck designs for a reinforced concrete bridge case study in Ottawa, Canada. With focus on chloride-induced corrosion as the primary decision metric for bridge deck replacement, the variation in deck design was focused on choice of bridge deck steel reinforcement, where carbon steel (CS), galvanized steel (GS) and stainless steel (SS) were considered. The results indicate a high level of sensitivity towards assumed distribution of surface chloride concentration (Co). Even under light Co conditions, the CS rebar deck performs worse (in terms of climate change potential [CCP]) than the GS- and SS- rebar decks by 22% and 13%, respectively, and this finding becomes more apparent under the higher Co sensitivity scenarios. On the other hand, the deck with GS-rebar out-performed the other decks for light-to-moderate Co conditions, whereas the SS-rebar deck had the lowest life cycle CCP under extreme Co conditions.
