Study on the Carbonation Properties of Fly Ash Concrete using a Vacuum Instrument

Abstract

Carbonation is one of the most important factors causing the corrosion of reinforcement concrete. Nevertheless, experimental studies on the concrete carbonation have not been carried out sufficiently because of the slow process of carbonation process. Therefore, this study adopts an experimental system exploiting a vacuum instrument that has been recently developed to accelerate carbonation instead of existing experimental system to conduct rapid carbonation tests on Portland cement and fly-ash cement concretes. Test results revealed that, compared to water-cement ratio of 40%, the carbonation depth increases from 103% to 138% for an increase of water-cement ratio from 45% to 60%. These results are larger than the carbonation depths obtained by mathematical model, and such difference is increasing with larger water-cement ratios. The results also indicated that larger fly-ash contents lead to sharp increase of the carbonation depth, which is in agreement with previous experimental researches. The adoption of the new accelerated carbonation test system enabled to shorten effectively the time required to produce experimental data compared to the existing carbonation test method. The experimental data obtained in this study together with ongoing acquisition of data using the new carbonation test method are expected to contribute in the understanding of the carbonation process of concrete structures in Korea.