Modeling steel corrosion in concrete structures - part 1: A new inverse relation between current density and potential for the cathodic reaction

Corrosion of steel reinforcement can seriously compromise the service life of reinforced concrete structures. Hence, service life prediction and enhancement of concrete structures under corrosion attack are of significant importance. As a result, numerical methods that can reliably predict the service life of concrete structures have attracted increasing attention. In this, the first of two companion papers, a simple and significantly improved inverse relation relating the current density with potential for the cathodic reaction is proposed. This enables the current densities to be determined accurately from the measured potentials. Equally importantly, the proposed inverse relation also enables the efficient and straight-forward nonlinear algorithm for modeling of steel corrosion in concrete structures to be developed. Such an algorithm is presented in the companion paper of this.