ABSTRACT
Roads and railway lines in difficult terrain are often supported by retaining structures. Their safety assessment is usually done by regular inspections. Investigations showed that especially cantilever walls suffered from corrosion damage along the horizontal construction joint between the foundation and the vertical wall segment, which is also the most sensitive area regarding stresses. The detection of damages in this region is a challenging task as the critical regions of these concrete structures are not easily accessible. They are located on the backfill side of the structure, so reverse procedures are required. This paper focuses on new approaches that accompanies numerical investigations and laboratory tests to determine the structural behavior due to a possible increase in inclination resulting from a corrosion damage. The possibilities of damage assessment with respect to uncertainties such as the stochastic distribution of corrosion and methods for the estimation of possible threshold values for alarms are presented.
