Service Life of Reinforced Concrete Structures. New Approach

The existing concepts about service life may be incomplete regarding those that must take into account the whole life cycle of a concrete structure. One of the reasons for this is the lack of certainty of the service life predictions which are based on models that take into account a mixture of stages. The life cycle of a structure has many similarities with that of a human being. In fact, it is no coincidence that engineering has adopted some terms from the medical sciences like pathology to refer to structures with problems of health . The objective of this paper is to discuss a new approach that takes into account the similarities among the several stages of service life of a human being and the concrete structures. The paper discusses the overlapping of the different life cycle stages as well as the reasons why the prediction models can fail.