A Study of Accelerated Corrosion Test and Chloride Penetration Analysis with Artificial Seawater Immersion Condition

Steel reinforcement buried in concrete structure in submerged zone does not easily become corroded due to lack of dissolved oxygen. For that reason, accelerated corrosion test in submerged state is performed with an electrochemical method, which is not suitable for actual corrosion mechanism and makes it difficult to find relevance with long-term behavior. In this study, accelerated corrosion test was performed with the temperature and chloride concentration as main variables in order to establish a method for accelerated corrosion test in submerged zone. Corrosion was determined by the result of reinforcement corrosion monitoring based on galvanic potential measurement and half-cell potential method. The accelerated corrosion test result showed that temperature had the most dominant influence. To determine the chloride content, chloride concentration by depth in the test sample was measured. With the same conditions, chloride penetration interpretation was performed by DuCOM, a FEM durability interpretation program. Also, a test was performed to measure dissolved oxygen according to soaking conditions of artificial seawater, which was used for verifying the validity of the accelerated corrosion test result.