ABSTRACT
The Italian infrastructural heritage is rather dated, with a large number of reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete bridges built between the ‘50s and the ‘80s, having already exceeded their expected service life. In many countries, the qualitative assessment of bridge vulnerability often relays on defect-based indexes derived from visual inspections. Many of these defects are related to reinforcement corrosion, which can become important in case of aggressive environments and/or insufficient maintenance. This study focuses on the numerical investigation of the effects of increasing corrosion levels on the seismic capacity of an existing viaduct pier in a marine environment. The time-dependent failure mode, with the possible change in the location of the plastic hinge, and/or the occurrence of brittle mechanisms related to rebar buckling or to an anticipated rebar rupture caused by a progressive steel embrittlement, are analysed through finite element analyses.
