ABSTRACT
Concrete buildings are designed in consideration of a specific expected lifetime. Usually for reinforced concrete structures in civil engineering as e.g. multi-storey car parks a minimum life time of approximately 50 years is strived for. Environmental factors like weather, location or general exposition can force aging- and damage-processes due to deterioration of concrete and/or reinforcement. The ingress of harmful species like CO2 or Cl− causes corrosion of the embedded reinforcement in the concrete structure. In this case especially older constructions with insufficiently concrete cover are not able to attain the assessed life time. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) can be applied as a fast and reliable method in order to identify harmful species and their accompanying damage processes.
