Dr. Shakouri gives a seminar on challenges in service life modeling at UNL
Significant progress has been made over the past 20 years in developing models to estimate the service life of reinforced concrete systems. The essential understandings of the mechanisms that control the transport of ions and moisture in concrete systems have been well researched and models for determining corrosion initiation, specifically chloride-induced corrosion initiation of the steel reinforcement, are commonly used in the engineering community.
Despite these advances, there is a lack of standardized testing for many of the critical input parameters that are used for service-life modeling. The literature is also replete with a wide range of values and distributions, some of which are used seemingly without any justification, which adds to the uncertainty and creates confusion among the users of these models. This seminar will review the current state-of-art approaches for service life modeling of concrete structures exposed to chloride-induced corrosion and discusses some of the challenges and issues associated with these methods. Topics that will be covered in this seminar are as follows: Chloride transport mechanisms in concrete Classic Nernst-Plank equation Extended Nernst-Plank equation Variability in input variables Probabilistic and risk-based models