Probablistic service life design for concrete structures in marine and road environments

Paper in proceeding, 2006

Reinforcement corrosion initiated by chlorides is one of the most common causes for limitation of the service life of reinforced concrete structures. Traditionally the design aspects of durability of concrete structures have been dealt with using so-called deem-to-satisfy approach, which usually results in a sufficiently long but not specified service life. Therefore during the last decades methods have been developed, which make explicit predictions of the service life. Normally deterministic data have been used in these predictions, which mean no consideration is given to the uncertainties in influencing factors. Instead probabilistic methods should be used, where uncertainties are included. In this paper probabilistic service life designs are made for concrete structures exposed in saline environments. Three different mathematical models have been used to make predictions, namely the Error-function, DuraCrete and ClinConc models.