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

The successful durability design of reinforced concrete structures
requires models capable of reliably describing both mechanisms of
damage and its progression over time. In a chloride laden
environment, most models used typically disregard the actual
damage, i.e. the corrosion of the reinforcing steel. Common service
life design practice only considers the end of the initiation phase of
the degradation process as a critical limit state. In this paper, a
holistic approach is presented that couples models used for
determining the time to depassivation and the time to cover cracking
as a result of reinforcement corrosion in a single limit state
calculation.