International CACRCS day – Parma

Capacity Assessment of Corroded Reinforced Concrete Structures – 25 March 2019

Structural assessment of existing structures and infrastructures is becoming crucial in many industrialized countries.
Since the great part of existing structures and infrastructures has already reached the service life of 50 years, today is of fundamental importance to assess the actual conditions of the structural element in order to evaluate the remaining service life.

One of the major cause of degradation in reinforced concrete structures is corrosion of steel rebar. Corrosion damage is not always visible to technicians, but nevertheless can lead to structural failure, loss of life, loss of capital investment, and environmental damage. Moreover, corrosion is the main cause of degradation in RC structures in non-exceptional conditions and can have also significant effects on the seismic behavior, leading to dangerous strain localizations and variations of strength distribution and rotation capacity.
A lot of attention has been paid, up to now, to the definition of proper techniques able to prevent or to detect corrosion damage, but very few data are available on the actual capability of numerical and design approach to predict the structural behavior of elements affected by corrosion problems.
This issue is fundamental in order to assess the residual bearing capacity of a damaged structure and to properly select the best strategy of action for the possible renewal of the structures under investigation.

The failure mechanisms of corroded structures, indeed, can be very different from the ones of new or sound construction (buckling of corroded rebar is a typical example) and they are of paramount importance in the evaluation of the structural safety.
For this reason, the theme of the meeting is “Capacity Assessment of Corroded Reinforced Concrete Structures”.
In order to assess the prediction capability of numerical and design tools, there is a strong need of reliable experimental benchmark. Because of this, some presentations of this workshop will be also dedicated to interesting experimental investigation not only on material but also on real scale structural elements affected by corrosion.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE