Inconstant Inertia Weight for Boundary Element Inverse Analysis to Detect RC Corrosion

Detecting the corrosion of reinforcing steel in concrete is important in order to prevent early failure of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. On the other hand, the conventional methods as the half-cell potential method still have limitations to detect the corrosion. Hence, the development of a computational method to overcome the limitations is very promising. One of the methods is boundary element inverse analysis (BEIA). However, the influence of numerical parameters on the performance of BEIA still needs to be explored. The aim of this research is to study the effect of inconstant inertia weight (W) on BEIA in order to locate reinforcing steel/rebar corrosion in concrete. BEIA was developed using the boundary element method (BEM) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). In performing BEIA, several electrical potential data which measured from half-cell potential measurements were taken as a reference. Numerical simulation on simplified RC with single corrosion shows that the corrosion on rebar can be detected with reasonable accuracy, i.e., the error is less than 5% when the gradient of W along iteration < −0.02. Hence, the use of inconstant W with Wup>0.5 has a significant effect on the BEIA performance in locating the corrosion.