Service life of prestressed high-strength concrete pile in marine environment considering effects of concrete stratification and temperature

•PHC piles show concrete stratification phenomenon due to centrifugal process.•Fick’s second law is used to derive diffusion equation for two-layer annulus.•Increase of mortar layer thickness leads to rapid decrease of service life.•Sealing pile ends is an effective method to extend service life of PHC piles. Prestressed high-strength concrete (PHC) piles have advantages of light weight and high load carrying capacity, which have been widely applied in coastal and offshore engineering. However, PHC piles serving in the coastal or offshore regions have already undergone severe durability problem. This paper presents a comprehensive method for predicting the service life of PHC piles in the marine environment, which reasonably takes the temperature effects and the concrete stratification caused by centrifugation of PHC piles into account. The pile service life is divided into the diffusion and corrosion periods. The service life of the diffusion period is predicted by solving the diffusion equation formulated for chloride ion diffusion in a two-layer ring medium, the results of which are compared with the data obtained from the elaborate experimental tests to examine the validity. The service life of the corrosion period is determined based on the ultimate corrosion expansion pressure produced by the accumulated corrosion products of steel bar. Various possible key factors, like protective cover thickness, initial chloride ion concentration, mortar layer thickness, etc., are considered to investigate how these parameters critically affect the pile service life. The results suggest that increasing mortar layer thickness can lead to a significant decrease of the service life in both diffusion and corrosion periods; and increasing protective cover thickness and sealing pile end are two effective ways to extend the service life of PHC piles.