Evaluation of The Residual Life of Corroded Prestressed Concrete Beams.

Over time, structures are continuously ageing and rapidly deteriorating during their lifecycle, becoming increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic failures. Nowadays the ability to reliably predict the long-term corrosion performance of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is a challenge. This paper presents a method for assessing the residual life of prestressed concrete (PC) beams without shear reinforcement, considering the failure modes which may affect the ultimate limit state. Two different spatial distributions of the corrosion level of strands have been considered: (i) constant corrosion level along the entire length of the beam and equal to the maximum corrosion level, and (ii) effective corrosion levels, detected measuring the mass loss, and considered constant along strands’ pieces 500 mm long