Experimental Investigation of an Efficient Retrofitting Technique for Corroded Concrete Structures

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.