A reliable assessment of the performance of reinforced concrete structures affected by reinforcement corrosion requires a through understanding of both material deterioration and its impact on structural behaviour in order to evaluate its safety and serviceability, in addition to estimating its remaining life. This paper presents an approach for service life prediction of reinforced concrete structures exposed to chloride environments that combines a finite element modeling of the chloride transport and a reliability-based analytical model for onset of damage and its accumulation. Service life is defined as the time until damage accumulation reaches an unacceptable level or 'limit state'. The approach used here combines analytical models of the actual physical deterioration mechanism and mechanical damage build-up with probabilistic methods to obtain a reliable quantitative estimate of the remaining life of deteriorating structures. The considerable uncertainties associated with the parameters that govern the build-up of corrosion-induced damage are modeled as random variables. By using Monte Carlo simulation, the probabilistic distributions of the chloride penetration front and corrosion initiation time are generated. The proposed approach is illustrated on a reinforced concrete bridge deck exposed to chlorides from de-icing salts.
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