Modelling concrete electrical resistivity at varied water and chloride contents

Concrete electrical resistivity is an important property in the assessment of reinforcement corrosion in concrete, and an essential parameter in the design and operation of cathodic protection for reinforced concrete structures. Water and chloride contents in concrete are highly variable for reinforced concrete structures in real world hostile environments. It leads to the interest to the characterization of their coupling effects on the concrete electrical resistivity. This paper at first investigates the current available models. Seeing that all the current models are purely empirical, this paper proposes an improvement with a semi-empirical model. The improvement highlights that the correlation between concrete electrical resistivity and the water content intrinsically establishes on the pore-size-distribution of the pore structure of concrete. At the end, the proposed model has been tested on two sets of experimental data and been compared with other two empirical models.