Galleria Cianca Presella: a highway gallery in the Swiss Alps near the San Bernardino Pass.
Galleria Cianca Presella: a highway gallery in the Swiss Alps near the San Bernardino Pass.
Products & Solutions

Deicing of roads: Safe but sorry

Winter is coming – and it is getting time to deice the roads to allow for a safe trip home. However, chlorides originating from deicing salts cause significant corrosion damage on reinforced concrete structures. Protecting roads with corrosion inhibitors can mitigate the detrimental effects of deicing salts.

To make roads safe in winter, the use of deicing salts is often inevitable. But these salts not only ensure that icy roads become safe again, they also attack the structure. The deicing crews in winter are therefore often followed by the construction crews in spring: potholes have to be filled and damages repaired. But it doesn't have to be that way. Protectosil® can help to mitigate the detrimental effects of deicing salts.

The silane-based corrosion inhibitor has proven its worth in a long-term test with highway gallery columns in the Swiss Alps.

Galleria Cianca Presella is a highway gallery in the Swiss Alps near the San Bernardino Pass, one of the most frequently used passes in the Alps. To take a closer look at the effectiveness of silane-based corrosion inhibitors, researchers incorporated sensors into the concrete of the gallery’s columns during its construction and treated the concrete surface with 500 g/m2 of Protectosil® CIT to prevent rebar corrosion. A long-term online monitoring system allowed to study the corrosion behavior via a Datalogger system.

Protectosil® reacts with the concrete matrix and the steel surface. It hinders the corrosion reaction and strengthens the passive film on the steel rebars. As the results of the online monitoring showed, the protective treatment lead to a measurable decrease in the corrosion rate, indicating that Protectosil® CIT is efficient and that it was properly applied, and that the lifetime of the structure was increased as well.