USA/Canada - Ice abrasion and frost deterioration of high performance concrete structures - service life

In the first phase the participants will review contributions to the objective of the project from their varying fields of expertise and possibilities for financial support for a main project. This will include brief overviews of expertise in the fields o f environmental loads (ice pressure, freezing, salt etc), concrete material science (porosity, strength, ice formation, bond ice-concrete), and stochastic and probabilistic approaches to service life modeling. Also existing studies bridging these areas sh ould be reviewed. We will start the review of this relatively broad research area by looking for suitable areas of research that can be applied in a service life model. It will be important that we fairly quickly can limit our objective, model and -input so that deterministic calculations and model verification can be reached as basis for the statistical variability of environmental and concrete material parameters. This does not rule out increasing the complexity of the models as we go along for example by including advanced numerical modeling of the physics involved. The outcome of the calculations should be the probability of obtaining a given service life compared to a defined limit state of a concrete structure exposed to the mentioned deteriorating forces In the second phase a workshop will be organized to present and discuss the contributions of the different parties and make a decision on where to apply for funding of the main project. For Finland/HUT (and probably VTT), and Norway/NTNU there ha ve been discussions about establishing an EU 7th framework program (2007-2013) project.We must also work on Canadian and US financing through EU-cooperation with Canada and US funding like the NSF. The third phase will be the development of a main projec t. For the case of an EU project Finland will be project leader for an application to the EU and we will work to find out about the agreement between the EU and Canada on financial support, as well as NSF.