The corrosion process in reinforced concrete structures, exposed to marine or industrial environments, causes the appearance and growth of cracks. As a consequence, this produces a slow degradation of the material physical properties, steel fragilization and a decrease of the bond strength and steel reinforcements, cross section, affecting its static and dynamic behavior.In the second half of the twentieth century, the importance of constructions' service life was noticed, so different techniques have been developed to predict the Residual Life of existing structures, in order to increase it. This situation has a significant economic impact on society.This paper presents a non-destructive technique to predict the Residual Life of reinforced concrete beams having different cracking levels, as results of steel reinforcement corrosion, considering the variation produced in the dynamic behavior, through the variation of the first natural vibration frequency.The reinforcement corrosion is an electrochemical process that can be quantified by measuring the intensity of the current on the concrete surface. In this paper, to simulate the corrosion process, a current is externally applied to the studied structure reinforcement and then crack widths and vibration natural frequencies are measured. Based on these measurements a mathematical model is proposed to predict structure remaining life. ª 2014 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Housing and Building National Research Center.

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The local stiffness reduction produced by cracks change the static and dynamic behavior of the structural elements and, by examining this change, crack position and magnitude can be identified. This paper presents a methodology which aim is the detection, location and quantification of the damage through the values of vertical displacements, produced by static loads. With the purpose of establishing the precision of the results obtained in planar structures, numerical simulations were made, analyzing them with the Finite Element Method. Furthermore, two techniques for the detection and damage location are presented. The first one is related to the displacement variation in a damaged structure in relation to the same structure without damage. The second technique is based on the elastic curvature which is computed by means of the Finite Differences Method. The techniques presented are versatile tools, of easy application at work, for structural damage identification.