Designing concrete durability by coupling limit states of corrosion initiation and corrosion induced cracking of concrete cover

The successful durability design of reinforced concrete structuresrequires models capable of reliably describing both mechanisms ofdamage and its progression over time. In a chloride ladenenvironment, most models used typically disregard the actualdamage, i.e. the corrosion of the reinforcing steel. Common servicelife design practice only considers the end of the initiation phase ofthe degradation process as a critical limit state. In this paper, aholistic approach is presented that couples models used fordetermining the time to depassivation and the time to cover crackingas a result of reinforcement corrosion in a single limit statecalculation