SIBS

Retaining walls such as other structures are subject to ageing and other environmental influences. Concrete structures, and especially reinforced concrete structures, suffer from concrete spalling, cracking or corrosion. Given by slender cross sections and high degrees of reinforcement (e. g. cantilever walls) corrosion damages can influence the bearing capacity and the stability. Especially the earth-sided regions of such structures (position of the bending reinforcement) and the connection areas between the vertical wall and the foundation slab can be subjected to such damage.

SIBS (Safety assessment of retaining walls) was a 4-year Project 2016-2019, where AIT was initiator and core member of the research team.

The detection of damages in this region is a challenging task as the critical regions of these concrete structures like the backside are not easily accessible.

To deal with this, various methods were tested, and full-scale tests (Rebhan et al. 2020) were performed to evaluate the best monitoring possibilities, and on top of that, the chance of detection was evaluated using a full probabilistic nonlinear FEM-analysis. New approaches, that accompany numerical investigations and laboratory tests, have been developed to determine the structural behaviour due to a possible increase in inclination resulting from a corrosion damage. The possibilities of damage assessment with respect to uncertainties such as the stochastic distribution of corrosion and methods for the estimation of possible threshold values for alarms are the main results of our research work.