Flexural strength improvement for structural glass: a numerical study

R Hin,J-C Sanglebœuf,V Han,K Cheng,F Bernard,V Keryvin,C Seang

doi:10.1088/1757-899x/849/1/012083

Abstract

Glass is generally known as a fragile material. It is sensible to the cracks created from manufacturing or contact damage. The strength of a perfect glass without crack could reach 10 GPa. By mean of strengthening such as thermal tempering, glass can be safely use for building as architectural elements and very limited to the structural elements. The authors have been developing glass strengthening methods and structural design for large scale glass beam. Some influencing factors are considered: material, premature crack effect, geometry of sample and bolt. The mechanical behaviour of glass is modelled as elastic-plastic material, which show significant results in glass-bolt contact problem. The crack length, size and position provide information of a critical angle that allow to govern the crack effect in the beam connection.

Highlights

In construction building, the usage of glass material increases remarkably for architectural elements and structural elements
In the flexural strength of a glass beam, the connection strength is predominant over the bearing capacity of the beam itself
It is very important to model the plastic behaviour for glass material in the glass-bolt contact problem

Summary

Introduction

The usage of glass material increases remarkably for architectural elements and structural elements. To be a primary structural element, glass need to sustain safely with high load and the glass connections must be able to transfer the load to other elements of building. According to the previous studies [3], the loadcarrying of glass connection is still limited because of the local failure at the contact areas. The distribution of principle stresses is an important factor. Some experiments on a monolithic annealed glass shown in figure 1 and figure 2 confirmed that the origin of failure is initiated from where the principle stresses reach the maximum value, that is at the angle of 90° from the contact loading direction. An observation on the hole’s surface shows that the drilling process induced some crack and important roughness on the lateral face of the hole.

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Conclusion