Maintaining Reliability of Concrete Structures. I: Role of Inspection/Repair

Abstract

This is the first of two papers that describe the role of in‐service inspection/repair in maintaining the reliability of concrete structures during a projected service period taking into account the randomness in existing damage and in damage detection. The degradation in strength of a component due to environmentally aggressive factors is evaluated based on a growth model for individual random damage that can be obtained from experimental data. The distribution function of damage intensity after an inspection and repair is updated using a Bayesian analysis. This methodology can be used to determine inspection/repair strategies that are necessary to keep the failure probability of a concrete structure at or below an established target. Sensitivity analysis shows that the variance in the function describing degradation in strength is small even if the variance of individual damage intensities is large. However, the degradation function is sensitive to the threshold of damage detection of the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) method selected for in‐service inspection.