Service life design for the Western Scheldt Tunnel

for large infrastructures are becoming more and more important. Service life requirements of 100 year or even more are usual. For the bored reinforced concrete tunnel under the Western Scheldt in the Netherlands the requirement was a service life of at least 100 years. No method had been specified to prove this service life. Since the concrete codes are only based on deem-to-satisfy nules for the durability, without any specification to the service life, it was not possible to base the design on existing codes. The service life design has been made on basis of the methodology that has been developed in a research project of the European Community. This project with the name `DuraCrete' has further improved the existing reliability and performance based structural design method by introducing the modelling of degradations and environmental actions. It is believed that the service life design of the Western Scheldt Tunnel is the first project were the DuraCrete approach has been applied in practic