Abstract
Curtain wall glazing systems are a major part of a building due to the multiple roles they have, including occupant protection against environmental effects and the transfer of loads to the structural system. From a structural perspective, limited analytical guidelines and methods exist to aid designers in their determination of the curtain wall performance without extensive simulation or laboratory testing. This study takes experimental data from full-scale, “unitized”, four-sided structural sealant glazing (4SSG) curtain wall system mockups featuring a re-entrant corner subjected to cyclic racking displacements in accordance with the American Architectural Manufacturers Association AAMA 501.6 protocol to derive and establish equations that predict the relative displacements of the glass relative to the glazing frame, based on the amount of inter-story drift. Through derivation and testing, sealant cohesive failure and glass cracking were identified as limit states and corresponding drift levels were determined to control many of the equations. Displacements from the newly derived equations were correlated to the effective shear strain value experienced by the structural silicone in the mockup concurrently with the curtain wall’s drift capacity. This paper provides detailed derivation of the kinematic equations for possible use by glazing design professionals. Such equations can help designers to more easily predict the drifts that cause damage to such systems by manual calculations without the need for expensive mockup testing or time-intensive computer models.
Highlights
In the absence of well-established analytical or numerical models, full-scale mockup testing is the main option for structural engineers and curtain wall designers, who need to evaluate the accurate value of system behavior and the response of “unitized” four-sided structural sealant glazing (4SSG) systems under seismic effects
The industry standard is to conduct full-scale mockup testing to evaluate the performance of curtain wall systems
This paper presents a portion of a broader study that involved racking testing, finite element modeling, and video capture techniques of curtain wall systems [14,22,23,24]
Summary
In the absence of well-established analytical or numerical models, full-scale mockup testing is the main option for structural engineers and curtain wall designers, who need to evaluate the accurate value of system behavior and the response of “unitized” four-sided structural sealant glazing (4SSG) systems under seismic effects. The industry standard is to conduct full-scale mockup testing to evaluate the performance of curtain wall systems. For practical curtain wall design projects, AAMA 501.6 must be used if analytical or numerical methods are not readily available or feasible. In addition to AAMA 501.4 and 501.6, a JRC report developed in 2014 [2] prescribes recommendations for structural glass design with respect to the Eurocode. Several key attributes of AAMA and JRC are similar in determining the structural performance of curtain walls. References [3,4] include some drawings and additional information about the application of AAMA standard tests
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