A Preliminary Study on Cathodic Prevention in Reinforced Mortar

This work presents the preliminary tests on the performance of cathodic prevention (CPre) in reinforced mortar, subjected to aggressive (10% NaCl environment). Cathodic prevention is an electrochemical technique for minimizing, actually "preventing" any eventual corrosion of the steel bars in reinforced concrete. Therefore, the main objective of this investigation is to monitor the performance of cathodic prevention (CPre) as an alternative of cathodic protection (CP) i.e. application before corrosion initiation, using low cathodic current densities (1 to 2.5 mA/m2 steel surface). The novelty here is the application of "pulse" cathodic prevention (pulse DC current), rather than the conventional steady DC technique. The paper reports on conventional monitoring (potential mapping and depolarization decay), coupled with visualization of the steel/cement paste interface, using SEM and EDX.