Abstract
Research work was devoted to the study of carbonation as one of the major causes of concrete deterioration. Big amount of field data and accelerated carbonation, in laboratory control tests, was collected. This led to many formulas describing the carbonation rate. However, most of them contain water/cement ratio and time as the only parameters affecting carbonation. Intuitively, carbonation should be affected, also, by CO2 concentration and environmental conditions. Hence, in this research, the effect of CO2 concentration on carbonation rate of concrete is clarified through experiments. This, besides a comparative study on the data available in the literature led to the introduction of new equation for the carbonation rate. This equation considers, as its parameters, the concentration of CO2 and temperature in addition to water/cement ratio. The equation is employed in correlating accelerated and natural carbonation and shows good performance.
