A Probability Method For Assessment On Coastal Reinforced Concrete Structures

It is very crucial to the durability assessment and design of reinforced concrete structures located in a marine environment to determine the time to concrete surface cracking, maximum expansive pressure of steel bars, surface crack width, and influencing factors. The three indexes can all be used to measure the service life of coastal reinforced concrete structures. Therefore, the study in this paper is of both theoretical significance and practical application value.The purpose of this paper is to present a probability method for the time to concrete surface cracking, maximum expansive pressure of steel bars and surface crack width. Based on a concentric cylinder model for the concrete cover cracking problem, an analytical solution are obtained for the time to concrete surface cracking, maximum expansive pressure of steel bars and surface crack width. The validity of the analytical solution is verified by comparing it with the experimental data collected from the literature. The minimum number of simulations is determined to achieve the stable results of the time to concrete surface cracking, maximum expansive pressure of steel bars and failure time. Through considering the variability of characteristic parameters of the structure and the environment located, numerical simulation results show that the time to concrete surface cracking, maximum expansive pressure of steel bars and failure time are either normal or lognormal random variables when each parameter is a normal random variable. The relative importance of various influencing factors is determined by further numerical analysis.