Considerations in determining service life of stainless steel reinforcement bar in concrete

摘要

Stainless steel reinforcement bar is increasingly being chosen as a viable solution forbuilding durable constructions. The extra initial investment cost involved withstainless reinforcement being justified whether it is used for whole mat construction inNorth American bridge decks or selectively only in the corrosion zone of bridgecolumns and pile caps in European designs across the rest of the world.Likewise in North America and Europe advice on codes of practice and standards arebecoming increasingly performance related and it is likely that future codes ofpractices will be performance related and that product standards will have to be of asimilar nature to facilitate this.The authors published a paper in 2009 at the Australasian Corrosion associationConference discussing the merits of the different methods of laboratory testing forCritical Chloride Threshold Levels (CCTL) of stainless steel reinforcing bar. Now aspredictive models are becoming more numerous and common in use this paperdiscusses of the relevance of the test methods with respect to the bridge lifeassumptions of the predictive models and future codes of practice.The paper also looks at real test data collected over a 4 year programme andcompares and contrasts the outcomes of the various methods.