Frost attack resistance and steel bar corrosion of antiwashout underwater concrete containing mineral admixtures

This study aims to evaluate frost durability and steel-bar corrosion in antiwashout-underwater concrete, which has been neglected to date. To achieve this goal, repeated freezing and thawing and accelerated steel-bar corrosion tests have been performed for three types of antiwashout-underwater concrete specimens.The results of repeated freezing and thawing test reveal that adding mineral admixtures has little effects on frost durability because of the large and uneven entrapped-air imprisoned by the cellulose-type antiwashout-underwater admixture. Slight improvement of frost durability was observed through the action of air-entrained (AE) agent in the case of SG50 which presented an air content of 6 ± 0.5%.Measurement results using the half-cell potential showed that, among the entire specimens, steel-bar in Control specimen manufactured under artificial seawater was the first one that exceeded the threshold value, −350 mV proposed by ASTM C 876, at 14 cycles, where the corresponding corrosion current density and concentration of water soluble chloride were measured as 0.3 μA/cm2 and 0.258%, respectively. For the other specimens, potential values became below −350 mV later than 18 cycles.