13th fib on line Phd course : Service life of concrete structures : from durability indicators to modeling

The service life duration of concrete structures is an important parameter of the sustainability of these structures. The lack of durability for reinforced concrete buildings and current structures involves high repair and maintenance costs and reduces the service life, the control of structure lifetime is a major challenge in terms of sustainable development.

The objective of the course is to present the challenges in terms of structure lifetime and prediction of this lifetime in the framework of a performance-based approach. For this, after a quick presentation of pathologies that can compromise the proper functioning of constructions, we will focus on the methods of characterizing the durability of concrete. These methods have been used on a wide range of concrete following a research program aimed at studying the qualification of concretes for given environments in the sense of the EN206 standard. It allowed to explore correlations between durability indicators and formulation parameters.

Finally, the modeling of the lifetime based on a performance-based approach will be presented and compared with results obtained on old structures.

All the works presented were carried out as part of the national project PERFDUB.