Performance Degradation of Subsea Shield Tunnel Segment Accounting for Concrete Strength Loss and Steel Bar Corrosion

Subsea shield tunnels usually serve in a typical corrosive marine environment. Under the action of chloride penetration and carbonization, tunnel lining segments are often damaged because of concrete strength loss and steel bar corrosion induced concrete cracking during their service life, which seriously degrades the service performance of the tunnels. A systematical experimental and numerical investigation into the performance degradation of subsea shield tunnel segments accounting for concrete strength loss and steel bar corrosion is presented in this paper. The study demonstrates that chloride penetration decreases the peak strength and elastic modulus of the segment concrete by 42% and 46.1%, respectively. The average of the ratio of dissipated energy to the total energy of dry concrete is much smaller than that of water saturated concrete and chlorine solution saturated concrete, and chloride penetration reduces the energy storage capacity of concrete, and the ability to resist damage is weakened. When steel bars corrode for 120 days, the outer cracks continue to extend, and the concrete around the inner steel bars just begin to crack initiation; when corrode for 20 years, the length of the inner cracks gradually exceeds that of the outer cracks, and the inner cracks initiating from different steel bars coalesce with each other and form a continuous failure surface, causing great serious damage to the segment. Due to the difference in concrete strength, for the outer layer, the evolution processes of steel bar corrosion-induced cracks show the characteristics of early initiation, slow propagation, and late coalescence, and those for the inner layer have the characteristics of late initiation, rapid propagation, and early coalescence. During the whole process the propagation speed of the inner and outer cracks appears to be fast first and then slow. Moreover, the study also illustrates that the final state of segment performance degradation after crack coalescence presents the characteristics of whole lamellar exfoliation of the concrete cover.

Mechanical Modification of Nanomaterials on Fully Saturated Concrete in Groundwater Reservoir Under Long-Term Water Immersion

With the increasing number of hydraulic structures in service, many scholars have investigated the performance of saturated concrete, however, there are few studies on the influences of different contents and types of nanomaterials on the performance of fully saturated concrete. In this paper, a series of experiments on concrete with different contents of nano SiO2, nano Al2O3 and nano TiO2 are performed, such as electron mirror scanning, uniaxial compression, acoustic emission, etc., and the microstructure, mechanical properties of samples are compared and analyzed. The results show that: 1) By the addition of various kinds of nanomaterials to saturated concrete, the microstructure of saturated concrete is significantly improved, and the compactness and integrity of the slurry are improved 2) The mechanical properties of saturated concrete are significantly improved by the addition of 3 wt% nanomaterials. And the compressive strength of the saturated concrete sample containing 3 wt% nano-Al2O3 is the largest and the deformation modulus of the saturated concrete sample containing 6 wt% nano-Al2O3 is the largest. 3) Compared with dry concrete, when the concrete is saturated, the modifying effect of nanomaterials on the mechanical properties of concrete is weakened. The results of this study have important guiding significance for the study of the nano-modification and the safe operation of hydraulic structures.

Determining the stressed-strained state of concrete in the zone of exposure to local laser radiation

This paper reports the results of the physical and numerical experiments on determining the stressed-strained state of concrete in protective structures in the region of the effect of local point laser radiation. The software package LIRA10.8 (release 3.4) was used to build a computer model in the statement of a stationary thermal conductivity problem. To this end, the findings from the experimental studies were applied – the resulting temperature distribution and changes in the structure of concrete on the surface and deep into concrete cubes for more than 120 samples of concrete with three levels of moisture content: dried, natural humidity, and water-saturated. This paper gives the parameters of the simulation, the results of a numerical experiment, their analysis, and comparison with the results of a physical experiment. The temperature fields when establishing the dynamic temperature equilibrium, the level of stresses in concrete, derived from the physical experiments, correlate well with the results of the numerical experiment. The maximum temperature determined by the optical method at the surface of concrete was 1,350+50 °С. Deviations at control points do not exceed 12–70 °С in the temperature effect zone and 18–176 °С (1–11 %). At the rated radiation power of 30 W, the second stage of interaction was achieved; at 100 W – the fourth stage for concrete with a moisture content of 0–2.5 %; and, for water-saturated concrete, the fifth stage of interaction with the laser beam. A significant decrease in the thresholds between the stages of interaction between laser radiation and concrete was revealed, especially water-saturated concrete, compared to the thresholds for metals (the thresholds between the third and fifth stages were reduced by 103–104 times). The destruction of the walls of water-saturated pores in concrete occurred under the pressure of water vapor. The tangent stresses, in this case, were 1.7 MPa, and the values for the coefficient Kр, determined by the method of acoustic emission, were in the range of 4‒6. Such results explain the absence of normal microcracks due to the hoop effect. It was established that in the contact zone between a laser beam and concrete, about 90 % of the radiation energy dissipates, and in the adjacent heating zone ‒ up to 77 %. The optimal speed of beam movement when cleaning the concrete surface from organic, paint, and other types of contamination of 0.5–2 mm/s (surface temperature, 100–300 °С) has been proposed

A Research About One-dimensional Chloride Ion Erosion In Concrete Under Drying-wetting Cycles

Reinforced concrete structures are now widely used in China, and with the exploitation of marine resources, many concrete structures are in a relatively harsh service environment. Concrete in wave and tidal stream areas is in a dry and wet cycle state. When unsaturated concrete is in a dry and wet cycle state, chloride ions will invade the concrete by diffusion and convection, which accelerates the erosion of the reinforcement within the concrete and degrades the concrete performance. Therefore, the study of chloride ion erosion in concrete under dry and wet cycles is particularly important. Fick’s law is a good predictor of the diffusion of chloride ions in saturated concrete with stable boundaries, but it is difficult to obtain satisfactory results for concrete under dry and wet cycles. There are many difficult parameters in the microscopic model that make programming the calculations more difficult. In this paper, we propose to use the radial basis function matching point method to solve the problem. It is found that the error is within acceptable limits and can be used to calculate the one-dimensional erosion of chloride ions under dry and wet cycles through solving the validation algorithm.

The Numerical study of the influence of a two-scale pore structure on the dynamic strength of water-saturated concrete

Many infrastructural concrete facilities, such as dams, bridge footings, foundations of port facilities and offshore drilling platforms, operate in a permanent contact with water. The permeable fractured-porous structure of concrete determines the water-saturated state of the surface layers of such concrete elements. Under dynamic contact loading, the pore fluid is capable of exerting a significant mechanical influence on the local stress-strain state and strength characteristics of the surface layers of concrete. This has to be taken into account when assessing the wear intensity of surface layers and predicting a concrete element’s service life. The aforesaid determines the relevance of the study aimed at identifying the influence of the pore fluid and characteristics of the concrete pore structure on the strength and fracture pattern under quasistatic and dynamic compressive loading. The present work is devoted to the theoretical study and generalization of the laws of mechanical influence of the pore fluid on the dynamic strength of high-strength concrete with a two-scale pore structure. The emphasis in the study is on analyzing the contributions of each of the pore subsystems to the integral mechanical effect of the fluid. To carry out such an analysis, a coupled hydromechanical model is developed. It takes into account the compositional structure of concrete, the presence of a pore space in a cement stone of two different scales, the interaction of a pore liquid and a solid-phase skeleton based on the Bio poroelasticity model, as well as fluid filtration in a pore space. By using the developed model were performed the numerical studies of the dependence between the compressive strength of the representative concrete volumes of the mesoscopic scale on the strain rate, the sample size, the pore fluid viscosity, and pore structure parameters. The simulation results showed the possibility of combining the obtained dependencies into a generalized (master) curve in terms of a combined dimensionless parameter, which has the meaning similar to the Darcy number. We identified two key factors that control the type and parameters of the concrete master curve of the dynamic strength. The first factor is the mobility of the pore fluid in the network of the capillary pores. It determines the rate of stress equalization in the porous skeleton due to fluid flow. The second factor is the interconnection of large micropores with the network of the small capillary pore channels. It determines the magnitude of the decrease in stress concentration in micropores by filtering the excess pore fluid into the capillary pore network. It is shown that the contributions of these two factors to the amplitude of variation of the dynamic strength of the water-saturated concrete are additive, and their total contribution reaches 25 %.