Remaining life assessment of corrosion affected reinforced concrete structural members is a topic of current R&D worldwide. There is an urgent need to develop more scientific rational methodologies for this purpose. Number of investigations have already been carried out to assess the damage/distress due to corrosion, that would help in remaining life assessment. While most of these studies are deterministic in nature, efforts are also being made to use probabilistic methods for damage assessment. However, an important aspect in remaining life estimation is the interpretation of the data related to damage/distress and making expert judgement about damage/distress level. Due consideration needs to be given to the quality of the data and the expert interpreting the data. In this paper, expert judgement regarding corrosion damage level is integrated with the structural risk, expressed in terms of probability of attaining a particular damage level, for the remaining life assessment of corrosion affected reinforced concrete structural members. In the proposed methodology, the thinking process of the expert, in corrosion damage assessment, is modelled within a probabilistic framework using Brunswikian theory. The performance of each expert is determined by the achievement index. The damage assessment procedure is integrated with Markov Chain model for risk-based remaining life assessment. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology in determining more rationally the remaining life, an example problem of remaining life assessment of a reinforced concrete bridge girder is considered.
展开▼
