New Approach to Service Life Design of Concrete Structure

Developed in a European Brite-Euram research project, a new service life design concept for reinforced concrete structures has been established. This new concept allows the design of reinforced concrete structures for a defined lifetime related to limit state formulations. The result of the durability design is a limit state-based failure probability of the structure. This new approach has been used for the design against reinforcement corrosion in uncracked concrete regions for various new structures as well as for the redesign and estimation of remaining service life of existing structures. These practical applications demonstrated the appropriateness of the approach. Within this publication the application of the approach to a bored tunnel construction in the Netherlands (Western-Scheldt project) will be presented. The construction consists of two different elements, the ramp and the bored tunnel itself (reinforced concrete and steel members). The tunnel has two tubes with an external diameter of 11.0 m and a length of 6.5 km. All elements have been designed according to the new performance based durability design procedure.