- Date
September 2013
- Authors
Jürgen Hackl
- Contact
- Web site
- Documentation
- Copyright
This document has been placed in the public domain.
- License
CoRe is released under the GNU General Public Licence.
- Version
1.0.1
If you have any problems, found bugs in the code or have feature request comments or questions, please feel free to send a mail to Jürgen Hackl.
CoRe (Concrete Reliability) is meant to provide a generic framework for stochastic modeling of reinforced concrete deterioration caused by corrosion. Thereby, the combination of structural reliability analysis and Bayesian networks provides a powerful tool for a computationally efficient and robust method, computing probabilities of rare events in complex structures, and also allows Bayesian updating of the model with measurements, monitoring and inspection results.
Reinforced concrete structures constitute an important fraction of the building infrastructure. This infrastructure is aging and a large number of structures will exceed the prescribed service period in the next decades. The aging of concrete structures is often accompanied by correspondent deterioration mechanisms. One of the major deterioration mechanisms is the corrosion of the reinforcing steel, caused by chloride ions or carbon dioxide exposure.
The decisions, made in connection to possible repair or renewals of these structures, have major implications on safety and cost efficiency in a societal dimension. Public authorities, entitled to administrate the infrastructure, are in need of schemes and methodologies that facilitate the optimal management of the already existing stock of structures, especially in regard to repair and maintenance planning.
In this work a generic framework for a stochastic modeling of reinforced concrete deterioration caused by corrosion is presented. This framework couples existing probabilistic models for chloride and carbonation initiation with models for the propagation and the effects of corrosion. For this purpose, a combination of structural reliability analysis and Bayesian networks is used for the reliability assessment of the reinforced concrete structure. This approach allows to compute probabilities of rare events for complex structures in an efficient way to update the model with new information from measurements, monitoring and inspection results.
This framework enables, for the first time, a holistic view of the current service life models, with corresponding sensitivity studies and finding optimal decisions for treating deteriorated reinforced concrete structures. The temporal evolvement of structures can also be represented and analyzed within this framework.
Keywords: Bayesian networks, corrosion, degradation, probabilistic modeling, probability, reinforced concrete, structural reliability analysis;
CoRe is based on the Master's thesis:
Hackl Jürgen: "Generic Framework for Stochastic Modeling of Reinforced Concrete Deterioration Caused by Corrosion". Master’s thesis, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 2013.
This Documentation provides all the information needed to install CoRe, code a probabilistic model, run the sampler, save and visualize the results.