ABSTRACT
The rate at which steel corrosion occurs in reinforced concrete is an essential parameter for assessing the residual service life of a structure and thus for maintenance planning. However, determining corrosion rates reliably, particularly on site, is not straightforward. In principle, there exist a variety of experimental methods to determine the corrosion rate such as electrochemical procedures, gravimetric (weight loss) measurements or other approaches (McCafferty, 2010). For reinforcement steel embedded in concrete, only electrochemical methods permit non-destructive measurements of instantaneous corrosion rates. These are typically based on applying an external polarization current to excite the system and recording the system response. The by far most common method is the so-called Linear Polarization Resistance (LPR) method.
