Quantification of rust penetration profile in reinforced concrete deduced by inverse modeling

Abstract Chloride-induced corrosion causes insidious deterioration in reinforced concrete structures. Conventional numerical models for corrosion expansion ignore the penetration of rust into concrete, leading to an overestimation of the rust expansion force in the concrete matrix. In this study, a reduction coefficient of the rust volume, β , associated with the rust penetration is introduced to improve the conventional model. An inverse modeling method is proposed to obtain β by combining X-ray computed tomography testing and the finite element method. The results showed that the obtained reduction coefficient of the rust volume was approximately 0.34 at the time of cracking and decreased with crack opening.