Concrete Bridge Durability Design and Maintenance

The fundamental approach for solving the durability deficiency is to perform the durability design for planned concrete bridges and the durability maintenance for existing concrete bridges. Most of the existing durability design and maintenance methods, however, are qualitative and contain many subjective factors, which cannot solve the problems such as whether the structure is safe or not throughout the service life. The critical problems, such as the design service life, the environmental parameters, the material degradation process, as well as the lifetime performance assessment method, are found out based on deep insight into the existing concrete bridge durability design and maintenance methods. Finally, the schematics of concrete bridge durability design and maintenance methods that can quantitatively evaluate the degradation process of concrete bridges are proposed and the further research direction is determined.