New experiment recipe for chloride penetration in concrete under water pressure

Chloride penetration is considered as a most crucial factor for the determination of the service life of concrete. A lot of experimental tools for the chloride penetration into concrete have been developed, however, the mechanism was based on only diffusion, although permeability is also main driving forces for the chloride penetration. Permeation reacts on submerged concrete impacting for short to long term durability while capillary suction occurs on only dried concrete for very early time. Furthermore, hydrostatic pressure increases in proportional to measured depth from the surface of water because of the increasing weight of water exerting downward force from above. It is thought, therefore, that the water pressure has a great influence on the chloride penetration and thereby on the service life of marine concrete.In this study, new experiment is designed to examine the effect of water pressure on chloride penetration in concrete quantitatively. As an experiment result, pressure leaded a quick chlorides penetration by a certain depth, while diffusion induced chlorides to penetrate inward slowly. Therefore, it was concluded that chloride should penetrates significantly by water pressure and the phenomena should be accelerated for concrete exposed to deep sea. The research is expected as a framework to define the service life of submerged concrete with water pressure and compute water permeability coefficient of cementitious materials.