The activities concerned with the evaluation, repair and restoration of structures are estimated to amount to 35% of the total volume of the work in the building sector and this continues to increase. The corrosion of rebars in the reinforced concrete structures (RCS) is the main reason for their degradation, so the use of reinforcing stainless steels seems to be one of the possible solutions with most probabilities of solving this problem. In this work, in order to demonstrate the advantages of using reinforcing stainless steels, the corrosion behaviour of AISI 304 and 316 reinforcements embedded in concrete slabs (C35/45 and C60/70 concrete) with two chloride contents are compared with three low-cost and low-Ni austenoferritic stainless steels and with the conventional carbon steel. The lower chloride contamination selected in this research, was enough to cause the corrosion in the active state of the carbon steel reinforcements, whereas the highest one exceeded the expected contamination in the natural environments, including sea media. The metallic materials remaining in the passive state can be considered, from the point of view of corrosion resistance, adequate as reinforcements in the RCS. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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