Performance of laminated glazing under fire conditions

Abstract

Glass breakage and fallout may change the ventilation condition of compartment which would significantly accelerate the enclosure fire development. Past research of glass in fires has focused on single and insulated glazing, whereas the thermal performance of laminated glass remains less understood which is increasingly used in high-rise building façade systems. In this work, the experimental data has been used to validate the heat transfer and thermo-mechanical models performed by ABAQUS. The experiment refers to two laminated glass panels with 600 × 600 mm2 area and 12.38 mm thickness (6 mm glass + 0.38 mm polyvinyl butyral + 6 mm glass), which were heated to break by a 500 × 500 mm2 square pool fire. The heat transfer models were verified by the recorded surface temperature at the ambient glass panel. The breakage times of both panels were predicted through the stress distribution, showing relatively good agreement with experimental observations. After the models were validated, a parametric study of laminated glazing, including the thickness of gel layer and the number of glass layers were conducted to investigate the significance of these parameters to the fire resistance of laminated glazing. It was established that the 1.52 mm interlayer and 4-glass-panel laminated glazing demonstrate the best fire resistance. However, the 0.38 mm and 3-glass-panel ones are recommended considering the relatively low construction cost with reasonable fire performance. This numerical model is proved to be capable of predicting the thermal performance of laminated glazing in fire safety design of glass façades.