Reliability updating with inspection and monitoring data in deteriorating reinforced concrete slabs

Corrosion is a common phenomenon in engineering structures; examples include corrosion of the reinforcement in RC structures, corrosion of steel plates in ship hulls or localized corrosion in pipelines. These corrosion mechanisms are generally subject to random spatial variability, due to random changes in influencing factors over space. When assessing the effect of inspections and measurements on the reliability of such structures, it is essential to account for this spatial variability: Due to correlation among influencing factors at separate points, the measurement results obtained at one location contain information on the corrosion process at other locations. In this paper, a novel algorithm for reliability updating [Straub D. Probabilistic Engineering Mechanics, 26(2): 254-258, 2011] is adopted to the spatial reliability analysis of RC corrosion conditional on measurements. The algorithm is computationally efficient and robust, thus facilitating the applications to reliability updating of large-scale structural systems subject to corrosion. The method is applied to an example concrete slab subject to chloride induced corrosion of the reinforcement, for which spatial measurements of concrete cover depth and chloride profiles are available