Modeling of the ionic transfers in saturated porous media: application to the penetration of chlorides through cementing materials

In this work, the problem of ionic species transport through concrete porous media has been documented. Chloride ions penetration in cementitious materials is one of the processes widely responsible for the degradation of concrete structures. Therefore there exists an immense need for its correct understanding and quantification. Different research groups worldwide have proposed different chloride ingress models. Here, a one-dimensional model based on a multi-species approach of the ionic transport is presented. It is the new version of a previous model MsDiff developed a few years ago in our group that describes the diffusion of ionic species with the Nernst-Planck equation instead of Fick's laws. This newer version is named, the package version of MsDiff after it requires a package of five input data at any given age of concrete. With a multi-species approach, it is possible to take into account the interactions, which exist among different ionic species in pore solution of concrete. The numerical scheme of the model is based on finite difference method with Crank-Nickolson and Law-Wendroff techniques. In order to run MsDiff, we do need an input data. Several experiments were performed accordingly to provide experimental feedback to MsDiff. Standard immersion tests were conducted to validate the outcomes of MsDiff. Special attention is given to the diffusion coefficients of the ions and the interactions between the ionic species and the solid phase. In addition to MsDiff, some other existing models were also tried for the sake of comparison with the experimental chloride profiles. Certain experimentation was conducted to watch the effect of exposure period, concrete age at exposure and concentration in the environmental solution. In the end, the simulations were performed with MsDiff in order to calculate the chloride-induced corrosion initiation time using the experimental data already achieved while making use of different criteria adopted by different research groups in order to evaluate the corrosion initiation. (author)