Durability Design of Concrete Structures

Preface

Durability of Concrete Structures: State of the Art

Durability is a term related to both performance and time, reflecting the degree to which a structure/infrastructure meets its intended functions for a given duration of time. This description applies to all types of structure and infrastructures in civil engineering. Actually, during the service life a structure displays time‐dependent behaviors by ageing of the structural materials. The ageing processes can be intrinsic to the structural materials or induced by the interactions between the service conditions and the structural materials. This picture holds for all structures and their constitutive materials. In fact, concrete structures have transient behaviors due to some well‐known time‐dependent properties of structural concrete, such as shrinkage and creep. Take creep, for example. Engineers had been challenged by this evolving property as early as the 1900s, the very beginning of concrete structures coming into use. During the following years the lack of consideration of creep, surely due to lack of knowledge, had caused some serious accidents in structural engineering; for example, the collapse of the Koror–Babelthuap Bridge, Palau, in 1996. The past century has witnessed considerable research efforts dedicated to this subject, and the colossal creep models and established databases. The awareness of the deterioration of concrete properties by environmental actions comes much later. In the early 1990s, field ...