Investigation of damage mechanism and resistance reduction due to rebar corrosion in concrete structures using experiment and simulation

This paper uses the phase-field method, taking into account the interfacial damage combined with the law of friction, to study the fracture of reinforced concrete (RC) beams subjected to corrosion. This paper contributes several new aspects as follows: (i) The phase-field method is developed for a three-dimensional (3D) problem; (ii) The RC beams contain either concrete without clam-shell (CS0) or 60% clam-shell replacing sand (CS60), and smooth rebars with diameters D10 or D14; (iii) These RC beams undergo accelerated corrosion testing for 0, 10, and 25 days; (iv) The beams (iii) are subjected to four-point bending tests to determine the damage, depending on the immersion time, the rebar diameter, and the replacement ratio of clam-shell; (v) The method (i) uses material parameters and the bond strength from the experiment to conduct the simulation. The comparison between experiment (iv) and simulation (v) has demonstrated the superiority of this proposed simulation method in addressing the presented problems. These results show that CS60 concrete can adapt well to the production of RC beams under corrosion conditions.