Durability Design of Concrete Structures: Phenomena, Modeling, and Practice

Li, Kefei

Preference :

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 structures and infrastructures in civil engineering. Actually, during service life, a structure displays time‐dependent behaviors by aging 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 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;