Experimental Investigation of Corrosion-Induced Cover Cracking in Reinforced Concrete Structures

Concrete cover cracking induced by reinforcement corrosion is an important problem in reinforced concrete structures. Several existing analytical models for cracking time are discussed, and it is found that the penetration of corrosion products into corrosion cracks is neglected in these models. Based on our study, a theoretical model that takes the ingress of rust into cracks into account is proposed to predict the cracking time. In order to analyze the amount of corrosion products deposited in cracks, an accelerated corrosion test was performed. Based on the experimental results, the parameter k, which deal with the ingress of corrosion products into cracks, is calibrated to be 0.1~0.3 for accelerated corrosion test. By comparing the predictions with the test results, it is found that the proposed model has high accuracy in analyzing the cracking time and that the mean absolute error between predictions and observations is about 9.4%.