Abstract
This paper investigates the use of bolted and brittle/ductile adhesive connections in glass structures. Two benchmark designs of shear connections are introduced and tested experimentally in quasi-static tensile tests. The designs consist of tempered glass and aluminium substrates while steel splices are used for the load application. In addition, material characterisation testing for the glass and the adhesive is performed and the outputs are used for the numerical simulation of the same joints. Pressure-sensitive, plasticity and failure models are introduced and calibrated to accurately capture the behaviour of the adhesives. Good agreement between the experimental observations and numerical predictions is achieved. The results show that both types of adhesive joints outperform bolted joints while counter-intuitively the lower strength ductile adhesive achieves consistently higher joint strength compared to the brittle adhesive. The numerical analyses highlight that while brittle adhesive joints fail once the fracture strain of the adhesive has been reached, while for ductile adhesives an extensive plastic zone develops near the areas of stress concentrations thereby delaying the damage initiation.
Highlights
Over the last decades the use of glass in the building industry has increased significantly
Bolted joints failed catastrophically at the lowest averaged load via glass fracture and displayed a non-linear, stick-slip stiffness response, which can be explained by the relative sliding of the substrates due to the clearance fit
This paper presents a combined experimental and numerical study of the load response and failure behaviour of functionally identical designs of bolted and brittle/ductile adhesive glass-steel joints at room temperature conditions
Summary
Over the last decades the use of glass in the building industry has increased significantly. A number of challenges related to the structural use of glass still remain, such as the uncertainty of glass strength, the lack of design standards and, most importantly, the lack of an effective and durable connection method to other structural building materials such as steel (IStructE 2014). One of the main challenges when using glass as a structural material is its brittleness. Failure of glass can happen without any warning in a catastrophic manner once the critical fracture toughness is exceeded, with failure originating at small surface cracks or internal flaws. While bolted joints have been and are still being used extensively, they lack structural efficiency and reliability as the drilling/cutting required may introduce flaws and discontinuities on the glass surface (Haldimann et al 2008)
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