Abstract
This research presents Phase 1 of a study for climate change impacts on the atmospheric corrosion of structural steel components of infrastructure such as bridges. ISO standards that provide quantitative models to calculate corrosion rate as function of key exposure parameters, namely, temperature, relative humility, chlorides, and sulfur dioxides are used in the evaluation, where the first-year corrosion rate is used to quantify and classify the severity of a corrosive environment. The corrosivity environment of six Canadian cities/locations for carbon steel bridges was modelled for the 1954-2020 period and the next 80 years using projected climatic data up to year 2100. The model was calibrated by the 10-year corrosion field data for these six locations for the 1954-1964 period, where good agreement was observed especially for locations in low and medium environmental corrosivity categories per ISO classification. The results also demonstrated that the methodology can be adopted in Canadian infrastructure standards/codes such as the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code to enhance the current descriptive environmental exposure with quantitative corrosion rates. This study represented an initial effort and in order to fully implement into a more reliable and quantitative corrosion protection design more research is required.
