Assessment of Corrosion Rate of Reinforcing Steel in Concrete Using Galvanostatic Pulse Transient Technique

This paper discusses a method of measuring transient potential response of a corrosion interface to a small galvanostatic pulse perturbation for a rapid assessment of the corrosion rate of reinforcing steel in concrete structures. Measurements were taken on 100 mm sections of steel bars which were subjected to a wide range of corrosion conditions, from passive steel to actively corroding steel. The duration of the applied galvanostatic pulse was varied between 5s and 180s, and the lateral distance of the point of measurement on the steel bar varied from zero to 400 mm. The result of the electrochemical transient response was investigated using a typical sampling rate of 1 kHz. Analysis of the transient potential response to the applied galvanostatic pulse has enabled the separation of equivalent electronic components so that the components of a series of capacitances and resistances, whose values are dependent on the corrosion condition of the reinforcing steel, could be isolated. The corrosion rate was calculated from a summation of the separate resistive components, which were associated with the corrosion interface, and was compared with the corrosion rate obtained from linear polarization resistance (LPR) method. The results show that the galvanostatic pulse transient technique enables the components of the polarization resistance to be evaluated separately so as to give more reliable corrosion rate values than those obtained from the LPR method. Additionally, this paper shows how the galvanostatic pulse transient response technique can be implemented. An appropriate measurement time for passive and actively corroding reinforcing steel is suggested for the galvanostatic pulse transient response measurements in the field site.