Seismic capacity assessment of existing corroded RC viaduct piers in marine environment

The Italian infrastructural heritage is rather dated, with a large number of reinforced concrete and pre-stressed concrete bridges built between the ‘50s and the ‘80s, having already exceeded their expected ser-vice life. In many countries, the qualitative assessment of bridge vulnerability often relays on defect-based indexes derived from visual inspections. Many of these defects are related to reinforcement corrosion, which can become important in case of aggressive environments and/or insufficient maintenance. This study focuses on the numerical investigation of the effects of increasing corrosion levels on the seismic capacity of an existing viaduct pier in a marine environment. The time-dependent failure mode, with the possible change in the location of the plastic hinge, and/or the occurrence of brittle mechanisms related to rebar buckling or to an anticipated rebar rupture caused by a progressive steel embrittlement, are analysed through finite element analyses