Introduction

Abstract

For the design of concrete structures, durability and service life prediction have increasingly gained importance in recent years. This comes as a result of the inadequate durability performance of many reinforced concrete structures built in the past decades, which places enormous strain on construction budgets worldwide. The dominant cause of premature deterioration of concrete structures is reinforcement corrosion related to carbonation or chloride ingress. Traditional durability design approaches are based on prescribed limiting values for selected mix design parameters such as water/binder ratio, compressive strength and cement content. However, prescriptive mix design parameters fail to adequately characterize the concrete’s resistance against carbonation or chloride ingress, because they ignore to a large extent the different performance of various binder types and of mineral components added to the cements or to the concrete itself, as well as the type of aggregate, and do not allow to take into account the influences of on-site practice during the construction process. Prescriptive approaches also cannot explicitly account for a rational service life requirement.