Prediction of Chloride Profile considering Binding of Chlorides in Cement Matrix

Chloride induced corrosion of steel reinforcement inside concrete is a major concern for concrete structures exposed to a marine environment. It is well known that transport of chloride ions in concrete occurs mainly through ionic/molecular diffusion, as a gradient of chloride concentration in the concrete pore solution is set. In the process of chloride transport, a portion of chlorides are bound in cement matrix then to be removed in the pore solution, and thus only the rest of chlorides which are not bound (i.e. free chlorides) leads the ingress of chlorides. However, since the measurement of free/bound chloride content is much susceptible to environmental conditions, chloride profiles expressed in total chlorides are evaluated to use in many studies In this study, the capacity of chloride binding in cement matrix was monitored for 150 days and then quantified using the Langmuir isotherm to determine the portions of free chlorides and bound chlorides at given total chlorides and the redistribution of free chlorides. Then, the diffusion of chloride ion in concrete was modeled by considering the binding capacity for the prediction of chloride profiles with the redistribution. The predicted chloride profiles were compared to those obtained from conventional model. It was found that the prediction of chloride profiles obtained by the model has shown slower diffusion than those by the conventional ones. This reflects that the prediction by total chloride may overestimate the ingress of chlorides by neglecting the redistribution of free chlorides caused by the binding capacity of cement matrix. From the evaluation, it is also shown that the service life prediction using the free chloride redistribution model needs different expression for the chloride threshold level which is expressed by the total chlorides in the conventional diffusion model.