Rebar corrosion in chloride environment

Chloride induced reinforcement corrosion in concrete is a serious durability problem. Different sources of chloride, i.e. chloride introduced at the fresh stage of concrete (i.e. internal chloride) and chloride entered during the hardened state (i.e. external chloride) may affect the performance of concrete in different ways. For the performance evaluation of reinforced concrete in chloride environment (i.e. both internal and external chloride), there is a need for performing different electrochemical tests to obtain various corrosion parameters that will specify the possibility and the magnitude of corrosion in concrete. In the present study, the results of an experimental investigation that includes different corrosion tests namely potential measurement, corrosion rate measurement and potentiodynamic polarization test have been presented and analyzed to evaluate the performance of concrete both in internal chloride and external chloride exposure conditions. In addition an attempt is made to correlate the corrosion parameters obtained from internal and external chloride exposure conditions. From the results it was observed that, dropped half-cell potential value obtained from external chloride exposure mostly lie in the active zone obtained from internal chloride exposure. In addition it was observed that there was significant difference in corrosion current values obtained from both internal and external chloride exposure conditions. Further on the basis of overall ranking obtained from the results of critical parameters from different exposure conditions, the performance of different cement–steel combinations against chloride induced rebar corrosion has been evaluated.

Research highlights
► Corrosion performance of cement and steel in internal and external chloride exposure.
► Comparison of corrosion parameters obtained from different corrosion tests.
► Corrosion current in internal chloride varies much from that in external chloride.
► A methodology in proposed to rank performance of different cement-steel combination.