Numerical Investigation on Stress Concentration of Tension Steel Bars with One or Two Corrosion Pits

Abstract EN

Pitting corrosion has been observed in steel bars of existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures in different erosion environments and has been identified as a potential origin for fatigue crack nucleation.

In the present study, under uniaxial tension loading, stress distribution in the steel bars with one or two semiellipsoidal corrosion pits has systematically been investigated by conducting a series of three-dimensional semiellipsoidal pitted models.

Based on the finite element analyses, it is shown that stress concentration factor (SCF) increases linearly with increasing pit aspect ratio (a/b) and increases nonlinearly with increasing pit relative depth (a/R) for single corrosion pit problem.

For double corrosion pits problem, the SCF decreases nonlinearly with increasing angle of two transverse pits (θ).

The interaction of two longitudinal pits can be ignored in the calculation of SCF even if the distance of two pits (d) is very small.