INFLUENCE OF CRACKS AND SATURATION ON MASS TRANSPORT INTO CONCRETE BY MESOSCALE COMPUTATIONAL METHOD

Author(s): Wang L.C., Bao J.W.
Book Title: RILEM International Symposium on Concrete Modelling - CONMOD 2014
Editor: Kefei Li, Peiyu Yan and Rongwei Yang
ISBN: 978-2-35158-139-1
e-ISBN: 978-2-35158-140-7
Publisher: RILEM Publications SARL
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 314-327
Total Pages: 14
Language: English

Abstract: For concrete structures exposed to marine environment or deicing salt, water penetration and chloride ingress into concrete play the crucial role for corrosion of steel reinforcement, which leads to the structural deterioration, even finally to a failure limit of some members. It has been well recognized that cracks or microcracks produced due to any mechanisms in practice have a considerable influence on the rate of water or corrosive medium (e.g. chloride) penetrate into concrete when compared with the corresponding rate in uncrack concrete because cracking can provide preference pathways to allow more water and chloride to ingress. In this paper, the transport coefficients of water and chloride through a single crack are developed by treating it as a parallel-plate configuration. The physical migration models coupled with capillary absorption and convection-diffusion are utilized to predict water penetration and chloride ingress into concrete. By means of the mesoscale method, in which concrete is modeled as the impermeable coarse aggregate embedded in the porous matrix separated by vulnerable interfacial transition zone, the lattice network model is presented to investigate water and chloride transport properties in sound and cracked concrete under the cyclic dry-wet condition. The influence of cracks and saturation level of concrete on transport process are numerically analyzed and discussed. The above proposed models are validated by experimental data from the literatures, showing good agreement with test results. It is found that the effect of saturation degree and cracks on water and chloride transport process is of great importance.

Online publication: 2015
Publication Type: full_text
Public price (Euros): 0.00