Abstract:
The repair and rehabilitation of reinforced concrete structures in coastal areas is a
major challenge to civil engineers. These structures often require repairs due to
concrete deterioration caused by reinforcement corrosion, sulfate attack, salt
weathering, or cracking due to environmental effects. As a result, the service life of
Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures would be reduced. Use of repairing and
retrofitting methods at the appropriate time will contribute enormous saving of
country's rehabilitation budget. This paper presents an experimental investigation
of repairing and retrofitting method for the RC structures corroded due to chloride
attack. A total of 12 beams, 120x200x1500 mm each, were cast and 'electrochemical
corrosion technique' was used to corrode the reinforcement bars of the specimens
with different corrosion conditions. As retrofitting method, Xypex layer was
applied on the corroded samples. The tests were conducted by applying both static
and dynamic loads. The ultimate load values in both tests were obtained before the
failures. Efficiency of retrofitting methods was evaluated by comparing the results
with the similar type of results of non-retrofitted beams. It was observed that there
was a 5% -15% strength increase for the severely corroded beams compared to the
similarly corroded non-retrofitted beams.
