Stability of reference electrodes embedded in concrete: a statistical evaluation Available to Purchase

Embeddable reference electrodes are essential in monitoring corrosion status of reinforcing steel in concrete structures when a continuous remote control of potential or surveys of sites difficult to access are required. Due to unavoidable potential fluctuations the comparison between different types of reference electrodes and their long term stability cannot be performed without a statistical approach to data analysis. An effort in this sense, with interesting results, has been made as reported in this paper. Three different embeddable reference electrodes were tested in two different concrete mixtures, a low resistivity and a high resistivity concrete. In spite of a wide data scatter a statistically significant distinction in the behaviour of different embeddable reference electrodes has been evidenced.