About the Seminar:

Reinforced concrete (RC) structures are widely used in construction applications to combine tensile strength with the compressive strength of concrete alone. While RC materials are common in buildings and roadways, they suffer from deterioration resulting from corrosion of the reinforcement material shortening service lifetimes. In this work, we propose the development of methodology to simulate environmental conditions and accelerate reinforcement aging using bipolar electrochemistry (BPEC) as a high through put screening method for passivation layers. BPEC is an electrochemical technique that can be used to simulate both anodic and cathodic environments within a single experiment on a single sample. This proposal aims to investigate the following: 1) how can BPEC be used to accelerate onset of reinforcement deterioration and 2) how can BPEC experiments accelerate and inform on corrosion onset of passivation layers? For RC materials, the anodic pole would simulate oxidation of the structure reinforcement leading to metal dissolution while the cathodic pole would form hydroxyl ions (-OH) that would form a passivating oxide layer. Accelerated deterioration would be supplemented by electrochemical testing such as electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) to understand changes in passivation resistivity. The extent of deterioration of the reinforcement would additionally be examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), microstructure analysis using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). With this work, the aim is to develop methodology for accelerated aging of reinforced materials to allow for high throughput screening of candidate passivation layer materials.