The Effect of Steel Corrosion on Bond Strength in Concrete Structures

The effect of steel corrosion on the behavior of bond between steel and the surrounding concrete was investigated. Pullout tests were carried out to demonstrate bond stress-slip response for reinforcing steel bars of a series of corrosion level. Specimens either confined or unconfined were investigated for evaluation of the effect of confinement on bond strength and failure mode. Also, the tests were analyzed using nonlinear finite element analysis. It was shown that for both confined and unconfined steel bars, bond strength generally decreases as the corrosion level increases when corrosion level is relatively high. Confinement was demonstrated to provide excellent means to conteract bond loss for corroded reinforcing steel bars. It was shown that unconfined specimens generally split at a small slip with a large crack width and result in splitting failure while confined specimens contribute to a small crack width and generally cause a pullout failure. The analysis results agree reasonably well with the experiments.