Assessment of aged reinforcing steels subjected to uncertain load histories on the basis of experimental analysis and numerical Simulation

Sub-project B01 investigates the current state and the remaining service life of reinforcing steels in extracted ele-ments. For this purpose, microstructures of real, used reinforcing steels, as well as their resulting mechanical re-sponse are experimentally characterised. A computer model is developed, where subcritical crack propagation due to cyclic loading is simulated at the microscale to construct a mesoscopic simulation model for the estimation of future damage states. The analyses include the quantification of uncertainties of the remaining service life, which result from variations in potential initial damage states and uncertain load histories.