Inspection, Diagnosis, Materials, and Processing Methods to Repair the Commercial Deck in Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala

The corrosion damage in reinforced concrete structures, cause enormous economic thrashings worldwide and the repairing processes represent a considerable cost for public and private companies. It is vitally important to ensure that these repairs are comprehensive, and consider the protection of structures against corrosion, to prevent recurrent damages, caused by corrosion processes. This document is dedicated to describe the sequence used to evaluate and to design the appropriate methods adapted to repair and to protect against the corrosion, the structures that comprise the beam of crowning the commercial pier in Puerto Quetzal Guatemala, using a variety of anodes of sacrifice and protection coverings to the steel of reinforced concrete.

The consideration of a dock system, where the main structures are 26 years old involve multiple problems about the preservation, which represents an impact in the economic investment and the plausible risks involved in the own operation. Even when an important effort was realized during 2007 (when several zones of concrete were substituted but with no plenty solution to the observed problem), because several regions were not well protected, steel fragments kept exposed. Consequently the mentioned zones show a faster and more intense affection.

The goals of this project involved the common office and field work, with evaluation of the structures, analysis of delaminations by acoustic mechanisms, corrosion potentials measurements, sampling by using the extraction of concrete nucleus, chloride and carbonated evaluation; physical impact tests and the consequent analysis of the general problem and the particularities in order to produce a set of solutions and recommendations. Based on the analysis, we identified a 20% of the studied areas with severe damages that require urgent attention, a 73% of the zones with corrosion hidden processes that need a shot period attention and just a 7% of the areas with minimal corrosion problems, which can be attended in a long period of time. An important identified factor is that there is a tremendous problem of chlorides penetration, which are generalized in the 100% of the areas between the first 0.5’’ and up to 94% for samples obtained from 2.5’’ a 3.5’’ that denotes an urgent attention about this parameter.

The conclusions of this work involved the proposal of concrete substitution, installation of sacrifice anodes (the types are related to the configuration of the zone to protect and the damaged degree), besides the application of anticorrosion coatings. The rehabilitation procedures were guided by certified specialists in the different corrosion and coating fields.