###### Abstract  
The corrosion of rebars in reinforced concrete structures impacts their geometry (diameter and ribs) and mass, damages the concrete at the interface between the two materials, deteriorates the bond strength, and causes the cracking of the concrete cover. In the following study, a 2D numerical model of the pull-out test is presented in order to study the impact of corrosion on the bond strength. Several parameters are investigated: the embedment depth, the rebar's diameter, and the width of the concrete cover. The model reproduces the slip of the rebar and the failure through the splitting of concrete. It integrates an interface between the two materials and a concrete damage model that simulate the deterioration of concrete in compression and tension. The results obtained are validated with experimental data from the literature. Moreover, a parametric study is carried out to determine the impact of the embedment depth, the diameter of the rebar, and the concrete cover on the bond strength. The present study confirms that a greater embedment depth increases the pulling load. The study also confirms that the rebar's diameter impacts highly the loss of bond between the rebar and the concrete cover. Lastly, the final main result of this paper is that the width of the concrete cover slows the loss of bond strength between the two materials. reinforced concrete; corrosion; finite element method; pull-out capacity; bond behavior; damage plasticity +
Footnote †: journal: Applied sciences  
repair and maintenance of these structures and reduces their life-expectancy. It is then of great importance to develop a numerical model that can simulate the corrosion process and assess the deterioration of these RC structures in order to help predict their behavior. The investigation of the bond deterioration due to corrosion has been widely investigated experimentally in the literature through pull-out tests in [PERSON] et al. [1], [PERSON] et al. [2], [PERSON] et al. [3], and [PERSON] et al. [4]. The corrosion process was performed artificially by immersing the specimens in a sodium chloride solution and applying a voltage between an electrode and the rebar. The corrosion was assumed to be uniform along the reinforcement, and the corrosion degree was controlled and varied for the different specimens. A pull-out test was then performed, and the evolution of the bond stress between the rebar and the concrete as a function of this corrosion degree was reported. Analytical models have also been proposed in the literature ([PERSON] et al. [5], [PERSON] et al. [6], [PERSON] et al. [7]) that express the evolution of the bond stress and that are validated by experimental results. [PERSON] et al. [8] proposed a different experimental protocol to study the impact of the non-uniform corrosion on the bond between concrete and the rebar. They partially coated the reinforcement with epoxy resin before they were casted in concrete and before performing the accelerated corrosion, ensuring that the rebar wasn't totally corroded. The impact of stirrups reinforcements has been studied by [PERSON] et al. [9], where they found that they were extremely corroded compared to the rebars and that they prevented failure by splitting the concrete cover in the pull-out tests they carried. A 3D numerical model of the pull-out test with corroded rebars has also been proposed by [PERSON] et al. [10] where they mainly investigated the damaging of the concrete cover. Another 3D numerical model has been proposed by [PERSON] et al. [11] to investigate the effect of corrosion on the bond strength through a numerical pull-out test carried out in the software ABAQUS. However, the numerical pull-out test models in the literature investigate either the evolution of the bond stress by manually adding the damage to the bond model or the damaging of the concrete cover by studying the evolution, length, and width of the tensile cracks.