Evaluation of additional protection methods to control reinforcement corrosion

The prevention of reinforcement corrosion is primarily achieved by using high quality concrete, adequate concrete cover and suitable casting and curing. Additional prevention methods are adopted when severe environmental conditions occur on structures requiring very long service life. While existing standards, EN 206 or Eurocode 2, adopt prescriptive approach, performance based methods can improve the evaluation of the service life and enable the comparison of available design options. The reliability of the prediction is very important and even widely used models (e.g. fib Model Code) still have open questions. In this paper different additional protection are evaluated: corrosion inhibitors, stainless steel rebars, concrete coatings. A simplified approach is used, considering that the serviceability limit state, i.e. initiation of corrosion in chloride containing environments, can be modeled through the analytical solution of the 2nd Fick's law of diffusion. The main factors influencing corrosion initiation (critical chlorides concentration, chlorides diffusion coefficient, surface chloride concentration, concrete cover) are represented by distribution of values and the probability distribution of service life is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulation.