Durability design of reinforced concrete structures

Corrosion is a frequent cause of degradation of reinforced concrete structures. In order to design a reinforced concrete structure subjected to reinforcement corrosion, a model which describes the initiation and subsequent propagation of corrosion is required. The International Federation of Concrete (FIB) probabilistic approach has been recently proposed in the literature for a service-life-oriented design of reinforced concrete structures. However, it needs to be validated on the long term. In order to understand its reliability, the FIB design procedure was applied to structures built in the past and its output was compared with the actual conditions arisen from inspection. A significant difference was observed between results of the model and results of field inspection, which may be due to various reasons, for example, the reliability of inspection results, uncertainty in the model parameters or in parameters chosen for the calculations.