Section: Application Domains

Corrosion and concrete carbonation

The team is interested in the theoretical and numerical analysis of mathematical models describing degradation of materials as concrete carbonation and corrosion. The study of such models is an important environmental and industrial issue. Atmospheric carbonation degrades reinforced concretes and limits the lifetime of civil engineering structures. Corrosion phenomena issues occur for instance in the reliability of nuclear power plants and the nuclear waste repository. The study of the long time evolution of these phenomena is of course fundamental in order to predict the lifetime of the structures.

From a mathematical point of view, the modeling of concrete carbonation (see [67]) as the modeling of corrosion in an underground repository (DPCM model developed by Bataillon et al. [71]) lead to systems of PDEs posed on moving domains. The coupling between convection-diffusion-reaction equations and moving boundary equations leads to challenging mathematical questions.