Comprehensive appraisal of the safety of hidden frame glass curtain wall based on fuzzy theory

Abstract

The falling accident of a building's curtain wall may bring adverse social impact and economic loss. It is therefore of great importance to efficiently and reliably identify the security status of existing curtain walls. Current safety appraisal methods for glass curtain walls are facing the adverse effect of a large amount of imperfect information and subjective indicators. There are shortcomings of these methods, such as: i) The appraisal rank is easily affected by subjective judging, ii) The key appraisal indicators are not clear, and iii) The top-level indicators are not scientifically determined and systematically evaluated through the lower-level indicators. This paper takes existing hidden frame glass curtain wall as the research object, divides the safety grade of curtain walls into four fuzzy ranks (fine, good, poor and dangerous) and establishes five levels of appraisal hierarchy for components. An appraisal weight determination system is established for existing hidden frame glass curtain walls in three aspects (appearance, material testing and bearing capacity testing) based on a survey among experienced curtain wall experts from diverse areas and professions. The frequency statistics method is used to determine the weights of the indicators. The ranks of quantitative and qualitative indicators are quantified using fuzzy theory. Finally, applicability of the proposed safety appraisal model is verified with a real project. The appraisal result obtained through the proposed models is consistent with the actual situation on a real project.